EVERY MOTHER IS A DAUGHTER(ISBN=) 英文原版

Mothers and daughters go through so much–yet when was the last
time a mother and daughter sat down collectively to write a book
together about it all? Perri Klass and her mother, Sheila Solomon
Klass, both gifted professional writers, prove to be ideal
collaborators as they examine their decades of motherhood,
daughterhood, and the wonderful, if sometimes fraught, ways their
lives have overlapped.

Perri notes with amazement how closely her own life has mirrored
her mother’s: Both have full-time careers (Perri is a pediatrician;
Sheila is recently retired from a long career as a college English
professor but goes on teaching); both have published books,
articles, and stories; each has three children; they both love to
read, and to pass books back and forth. They also love to travel–in
fact, they often take trips together (and live to tell the tale).
But in truth, the harder they look at their lives, the more Perri
and Sheila acknowledge their profound differences in circumstance
and temperament.

A child of the Depression, Sheila was raised in Brooklyn by
Orthodox Jewish parents who considered education an unnecessary
luxury for girls. Starting with her college education, she has
fought for everything she’s ever accomplished. Perri, on the other
hand, grew up privileged and rebellious in the New Jersey suburbs
of the 1960s and 1970s. For Sheila, fanatically frugal, wasting
time or money is a crime, and luxury is unthinkable while Perri
enjoys the occasional small luxury, but has not been successful at
enticing her mother into even the tiniest self-indulgence.

Each writing in her own unmistakable voice, Perri and Sheila take
turns exploring the joys and pains, the love and resentment, the
petty irritations and abiding respect, that have always bound them
together. Sheila recounts the adventure of giving birth to Perri in
a tiny town in Trinidad where her husband was doing anthropological
fieldwork. Perri confesses that she can’t tame her domestic chaos
even though she knows it drives her mother crazy. Sheila
rhapsodizes about the bliss of becoming a grandmother. Perri
marvels at her mother’s fearless navigation of the New York City
subways. Together they compare thoughts on bringing up children and
working, confess long-hidden sorrows, relish precious memories–and
even offer family recipes and knitting patterns.

Looking deep into the lives they have lived separately and
together, Perri and Sheila tell their mother-daughter story with
honesty, humor, zest, and mutual admiration. A memoir in two
voices, Every Mother Is a Daughter is a duet that resonates with
the experiences that all mothers and daughters will
recognize.