THIS IS YOUR MOTHER

A debut memoirist explores her relationship with the powerful but thwarted mother who dominated her life.

Simpson’s mother, Sallie, was a born survivor. The sickly daughter of sharecropper parents, she rose above her circumstances through education and a teaching career she paused for motherhood. By the time Simpson was born, Sallie had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and become a divorced single mother of two. With sensitivity and uncompromising candor, the author tells the story of how her mother struggled to raise her children while coping with ovarian, breast, and blood/spinal cancer. Each new diagnosis brought “an endless loop of psychological torture [that taunted her] family to guess when she [would] go.” Illness also made it difficult for Sallie to keep a job and forced her and her daughters to “shift…from apartments to hotels.” Her mother’s faith in God and belief in miracles, coupled with the exceptional street-hustling skills that Simpson calls “reverse Robin Hooding”—“in which you challenge the poor to give to the poor if they’re working for the rich”—helped keep the family minimally fed and sheltered during hard times. Sallie’s tenacity became the backbone of the “scriptures” of survival that she handed down to Simpson. Her own quest for freedom from the American “underbelly” took her down paths where race, poverty, and Sallie’s continued spiral into destitution threatened the success she ultimately earned. As it examines entangled family dynamics rooted in faith and loyalty, this poignant memoir reveals the lifelong impact, for good and for ill, of the ever-powerful mother-daughter bond.

A searingly honest book about surviving America at the thorny intersection of race, class, and gender.