The Goodbye Diaries

The Goodbye Diaries PDF Author: Marisa Bardach Ramel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781948018630
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Two months to live. That's what the doctor says. Sally responds with grace and optimism. Marisa responds by closing herself off. If her mother is going to die before she graduates from high school, why even try. Cancer has already ruined everything. Honest and heartfelt, "The Goodbye Diaries" offers a touching glimpse into both sides of terminal illness -- the one who will leave and the one who will be left behind. Told in alternating voices, Sally and Marisa reveal their fears, their frustrations, and their fierce connection to each other. -- back cover.

The Goodbye Diaries

The Goodbye Diaries PDF Author: Marisa Bardach Ramel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781948018630
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
Two months to live. That's what the doctor says. Sally responds with grace and optimism. Marisa responds by closing herself off. If her mother is going to die before she graduates from high school, why even try. Cancer has already ruined everything. Honest and heartfelt, "The Goodbye Diaries" offers a touching glimpse into both sides of terminal illness -- the one who will leave and the one who will be left behind. Told in alternating voices, Sally and Marisa reveal their fears, their frustrations, and their fierce connection to each other. -- back cover.

The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye PDF Author: Meghan O'Rourke
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101486554
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"Anguished, beautifully written... The Long Goodbye is an elegiac depiction of drama as old as life." -- The New York Times Book Review From one of America's foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love. What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O'Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief-its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies-an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond. O'Rourke's story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother's illness-and separating from her husband-left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes her family persevere even in the face of immeasurable loss. With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye conveys the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life, and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Effortlessly blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, it is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.

The Goodbye Baby

The Goodbye Baby PDF Author: Elaine Pinkerton
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1468598139
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Adopted at age five, author Elaine Pinkerton hid the fact that her original parents didnt want her. At age ten, she found comfort in keeping a diary and escaped into the world of books. Now, years later, Pinkerton revisits four decades of diaries and offers a look at her life and what it meant to her to be adopted. Based on those forty diaries, she shares her story in The Goodbye Baby. With diary excerpts included, as well as narrative, Pinkerton tells about her journey through the thorny issues of adoption, a search for healing, and an inspiring finale. Praise for The Goodbye Baby The Goodbye Baby is a touching story that will inspire readers, whether or not adoption played a part in their lives. Elaine Pinkerton demonstrates how we can come to understand our inherent worth, regardless of early circumstances. Jann Arrington Wolcott, Author, Brujo So many of us appear fine on the outside. Yet internally we are struggling with a negative belief we developed in childhood, a self-invalidating perception that colored the experiences that followed. The Goodbye Baby reveals a wonderful accomplishment: the full-grown woman who has come to see that she is gem! Martha Davis, Licensed Psychotherapist, Santa Fe, New Mexico In The Goodbye Baby, Elaine Pinkerton reveals the bruises of adoption that impacted her from the tender age of five. Through excerpts from personal journals she kept for forty years, we experience her frustrations and successes as she strives to be good enough for her beloved adoptive parents and in all areas of her later life. Rosemary Zibart, Journalist and Author, Far and Away

Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter

Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter PDF Author: Melissa Francis
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 1602861757
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The Glass Castle meets The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in this dazzlingly honest and provocative family memoir by former child actress and current Fox Business Network anchor Melissa Francis. When Melissa Francis was eight years old, she won the role of lifetime: playing Cassandra Cooper Ingalls, the little girl who was adopted with her brother (played by young Jason Bateman) by the Ingalls family on the world's most famous primetime soap opera, Little House on the Prairie. Despite her age, she was already a veteran actress, living a charmed life, moving from one Hollywood set to the next. But behind the scenes, her success was fueled by the pride, pressure, and sometimes grinding cruelty of her stage mother, as fame and a mother's ambition pushed her older sister deeper into the shadows. Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter is a fascinating account of life as a child star in the 1980's, and also a startling tale of a family under the care of a highly neurotic, dangerously competitive "tiger mother." But perhaps most importantly, now that Melissa has two sons of her own, it's a meditation on motherhood, and the value of pushing your children: how hard should you push a child to succeed, and at what point does your help turn into harm?

My Mother's Daughter

My Mother's Daughter PDF Author: Rona Maynard
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 155199190X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Personal memories of the sort her Chatelaine readers adored — a remarkable life story seen through the window of her relationship with her mother. Every woman’s relationship with her mother is special. Yet everyone will recognize some parts of another woman’s story, especially if it is told as honestly and as sensitively as Rona Maynard tells it here. As a little girl, Maynard soon came to see that her family was not an ordinary one. Her father, Max, was an artist and an alcoholic. Her mother was Fredelle Maynard, a brilliant academic who could not get a teaching job because she was a woman. Instead she became a writer — the author of Raisins and Almonds — and, above all, a driving, loving, ambitious, overpowering mother. In her shadow (and that of younger sister Joyce, who went off at eighteen to live with J.D. Salinger) Rona took time to blossom as a writer and editor in Toronto. This book takes us through her career, step by step, including the miseries of being accused by her son’s teachers — and her own mother — of being a bad mother, overly concerned with her own career. Rona’s strong, direct style will ring true for every working woman. Through the magic of her writing, she gives a clear-eyed and affectionate account of her relationship with a demanding, loving mother. I said to my father, "You don’t live here any more. This is Mother’s house, not yours. It’s time for you to go." My father cursed me. He shook his fist. Then he left and never came back. —From My Mother’s Daughter

14 Days

14 Days PDF Author: Lisa Goich
Publisher: Savio Republic
ISBN: 9781618685605
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"I wonder if my first breath was as soul-stirring to my mother as her last breath was to me." How do you let go of a hand you've held your whole life? When Lisa traveled home to visit her parents in December 2011, she never expected an ordinary three-day weekend to turn into an extraordinary 14-day observance of her mother’s life – and ultimately – death. 14 Days is a story of parental loss, and how to lovingly, bravely and gracefully let go of a hand you’ve been holding your entire life. From a child’s first breath, to a mother’s last, this memoir shows how closing that circle can be a celebration of this unbreakable bond.

The Space Between

The Space Between PDF Author: Virginia A. Simpson
Publisher: She Writes Press
ISBN: 1631520504
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
2015-2016 Sarton Story Circle: Memoir Winner 2016-2017 Readers Views Award: Memoir/Autobiography/Biography Winner, West Pacific Regional Winner 2017 Independent Press Award: Relationships Winner 2017 Northern California Publishers and Authors Second Place in Book Cover 2017 Northern California Publishers and Authors Second Place in Memoir 2017 Readers' Favorite Book Award Bronze Winner 2017 International Book Awards: Autobiography/Memoir Finalist 2016 National Indie Excellence Awards: Memoir Finalist Everyone has or had a mother. Dr. Virginia A. Simpson did too. She thought they had a wonderful relationship and had worked out all of their issues when a life-threatening illness necessitated her mother, Ruth, come live with her. When her mother moved in, she brought with her all their old issues and during the six years they lived together, they added more. Although an expert in the field of death, dying, and bereavement, Virginia often found herself overwhelmed by her caregiving role as her mother’s health continued to decline. She also felt herself on a race against time to heal their relationship before her mother died. Described as “stunning, beautiful, and honest,” The Space Between: A Memoir of Mother-Daughter Love at the End of Life offers an intimate window into the challenges of being a caregiving while also providing important information about the realities of end of life care. The Space Between gives us hope that even the most contentious relationship can be healed. By the end of Ruth’s life, the only space between Virginia and her mother was filled with love.

Mother Daughter Me

Mother Daughter Me PDF Author: Katie Hafner
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812981693
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner’s remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a “year in Provence” with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie’s teenage daughter. Katie and Zoë had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a seventy-seven-year-old woman set in her ways. Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and her mother would become friends, and that Helen would grow close to her exceptional granddaughter, Katie embarked on an experiment in intergenerational living that she would soon discover was filled with land mines: memories of her parents’ painful divorce, of her mother’s drinking, of dislocating moves back and forth across the country, and of Katie’s own widowhood and bumpy recovery. Helen, for her part, was also holding difficult issues at bay. How these three women from such different generations learn to navigate their challenging, turbulent, and ultimately healing journey together makes for riveting reading. By turns heartbreaking and funny—and always insightful—Katie Hafner’s brave and loving book answers questions about the universal truths of family that are central to the lives of so many. Praise for Mother Daughter Me “The most raw, honest and engaging memoir I’ve read in a long time.”—KJ Dell’Antonia, The New York Times “A brilliant, funny, poignant, and wrenching story of three generations under one roof, unlike anything I have ever read.”—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone “Weaving past with present, anecdote with analysis, [Katie] Hafner’s riveting account of multigenerational living and mother-daughter frictions, of love and forgiveness, is devoid of self-pity and unafraid of self-blame. . . . [Hafner is] a bright—and appealing—heroine.”—Cathi Hanauer, Elle “[A] frank and searching account . . . Currents of grief, guilt, longing and forgiveness flow through the compelling narrative.”—Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle “A touching saga that shines . . . We see how years-old unresolved emotions manifest.”—Lindsay Deutsch, USA Today “[Hafner’s] memoir shines a light on nurturing deficits repeated through generations and will lead many readers to relive their own struggles with forgiveness.”—Erica Jong, People “An unusually graceful story, one that balances honesty and tact . . . Hafner narrates the events so adeptly that they feel enlightening.”—Harper’s “Heartbreakingly honest, yet not without hope and flashes of wry humor.”—Kirkus Reviews “[An] emotionally raw memoir examining the delicate, inevitable shift from dependence to independence and back again.”—O: The Oprah Magazine (Ten Titles to Pick Up Now)

The Year My Mother Came Back

The Year My Mother Came Back PDF Author: Alice Eve Cohen
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616203196
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
“A riveting journey.” —Julie Metz, author of Perfection “A perfect book. I want to tell everyone, every mother, every daughter, to read it.” —Abigail Thomas, bestselling author of A Three Dog Life For the first time in decades I’m remembering Mom, all of her--the wonderful and terrible things about her that I’ve cast out of my thoughts for so long. I’m still struggling to prevent these memories from erupting from their subterranean depths. Trying to hold back the flood. I can’t, not today. The levees break. Thirty years after her death, Alice Eve Cohen’s mother appears to her, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year Alice has had to face: the year her youngest daughter needs a harrowing surgery, her eldest daughter decides to reunite with her birth mother, and Alice herself receives a daunting diagnosis. As it turns out, it’s entirely possible for the people we’ve lost to come back to us when we need them the most. Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing, Alice approaches it with humor, intelligence, and honesty. What she learns is that she must revisit her childhood and allow herself to be a daughter once more in order to take care of her own girls. Understanding and forgiving her mother’s parenting transgressions leads her to accept her own and to realize that she doesn’t have to be perfect to be a good mother. “Alice Eve Cohen’s warm, witty, wise memoir is an elixir of love. It captures the struggles of every woman who ever wanted to be a better mother or daughter. Read it and weep, and laugh, and love.” —Nancy Bachrach, author of The Center of the Universe “Funny, painful, absurd, and heartwarming . . . Alice’s struggle to accept her imperfect self is a loving message tomothers who struggle to live life with grace. A beautiful book.” —Julie Metz, New York Times bestselling author of Perfection “Cohen navigates what was a perfect storm of a year . . . What she made of this year is a book so honest, so moving, and ultimately so wise that it is a privilege to take the journey with her.” —Abigail Thomas, bestselling author of A Three Dog Life “I love, love, love this book. It’s so rich, so real, and so moving . . . An astonishingly wonderful book—I was enthralled.” —Caroline Leavitt, bestselling author of Pictures of You “Compassionate, compelling, and told in luscious prose that practically begs you to sink in and linger, Cohen’s imaginative story and its fascinating characters will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.” —Jessie Sholl, author of Dirty Secret

Forever Sunday: A Mother-Daughter Memoir

Forever Sunday: A Mother-Daughter Memoir PDF Author: Susan Morley
Publisher: Author
ISBN: 9781736329207
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Susan's mother is difficult, spunky, quirky, and a bit demanding of her, but when her mother gets Alzheimer's, Susan is thrust into a world of ludicrous and sometimes hilarious circumstances and describes in heart-wrenching detail how she deals with feelings of guilt and frustration. She gives us glimpses inside her own life and reveals with honest and evocative intimacy her disastrous relationships, how she manages them, the role her mother plays in them, and how she grows and learns in the process. Forever Sunday is a true story of the bond between a mother and daughter. It covers Susan's mother's life from childhood to an elderly woman, details of Susan's life, how their relationship develops, and the ways in which it changes when Alzheimer's strikes. According to the Alzheimer's Association, over five million Americans are afflicted with Alzheimer's disease in 2020. By 2050, it is projected to rise to 16 million. This disease kills more than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. One out of every 10 people over the age of 65 has Alzheimer's today. This book reveals some of the warning signs and answers questions to help others deal with this horrific disease. The author guides us through and leaves us with an unforgettable slice of history spanning from 1917 to 2013-96 years.