BOTH SIDES OF THEN

Griffith offers a dual-narrative memoir tracing the generational wounds, secrets, and small acts of resilience that shape a mother and daughter’s lives.

In 1987, when the author was 13 and living in Tacoma, Washington, she learned that her mother, Anna, once relinquished a baby for adoption and that her father was leaving the family. Her world fractured overnight, and a turbulent adolescence followed, marked by self-destruction, longing, and a desperate search for stability. As she grew older, she attempted to make sense of the chaos by piecing together the scattered stories her mother shared throughout her childhood. Her mother was raised in a Baptist orphanage in 1950s Philadelphia and came of age with little preparation for life from her conservative housemothers; later, as a young woman, she became pregnant out of wedlock. Anna decided to put her newborn son up for adoption, and although her path eventually led to marriage and motherhood, the unresolved grief of her early years cast a shadow over her later life. In alternating chapters, the book follows the author through the early unraveling of her family, the painful fallout of her mother’s secrets and her father’s departure, and her own journey through therapy, love, loss, marriage, and motherhood. As she revisits her mother’s past, the author writes of how she began to better understand the forces that shaped her and worked through them: “These were the legacies gifted to me, and as I began to accept myself, the fear of owning them dissipated.” The narrative effectively charts the lives of two women, each fighting fiercely to claim their own agency. It encompasses a wide range of experiences, including life at orphanage, adoption, eating disorders, divorce, and the complicated terrain of step-parenting. The women’s stories insightfully converge in moments of reckoning and reconciliation, loud arguments and quiet apologies; the arrival of a new generation offers each woman a chance at healing. Overall, this book will provide a sense of validation to those who carry their own generational traumas, and powerful revelations for those who do not.

A candid intergenerational story of survival, motherhood, and the fragile ties that bind families together.