This ode to the relationships between midlife mothers and their 20-to-30-year-old daughters has all the substance of a greeting-card poem. Too bad. Its superficiality does an injustice to the mothers, who, now in their late 40s and 50s, are the cutting edge of the feminist changeover, and to their daughters, who author Caron (Don’t Stop Loving Me: A Reassuring Guide for Mothers of Adolescent Daughters, 1991, etc.) describes as a “unique generation.” The subject is the shift from the tension of adolescent conflict between mother and daughter to a more mature connection between equals, if not peers. In chapters that cover “The College Years” and “Communicating With Each Other,” as well as boyfriends, divorce, grandmothers, spirituality, and a daughter’s marriage, Caron presents information derived from interviews with numerous (it’s not clear how many) mothers and daughters. In essence, the twentysomething daughters have many more options than their mothers had. Postgraduate education, careers as opposed to jobs, live-in arrangements with lovers of the opposite or same sex, the choice of having children or not—these are all on the menu for daughters born in the late 1960s and ’70s. Caron gives that generational difference due weight, exploring how both daughters and mothers are pressured to reinvent themselves, the daughter making it on her own, and the mother, at menopause, evaluating her new options. Anecdotes and interviews are interspersed with the author’s reflections and advice; the comments tend to belabor the obvious (“mother and daughter . . . must move on and adjust to their first years of living independently of each other”); the interviewees seem to be an assemblage of friends and friends of friends, whose names and locations “are not real.” Lacking substance and spark, this report’s greatest reward is that the mothers and daughters represented really do seem to like each other. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5149-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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