Worth A Read Absolutely
Length 272
Quick Review Elissa Altman and her mother have always had a trying relationship. Altman explores their history in order to come to peace with and understand it.
Mother daughter relationships are hard under even the best of circumstances. When someone puts pen to paper about it, you know it is even more fraught. And usually the mom is dead, but Elissa Altman writes while her mother is still living. Motherland is, at its essence, an exploration of addiction and recovery and living with it.
Moms are hard. I probably have a skewed perception because I have struggled with the mom relationship since I became a cognizant person. Motherland resonated with me on a very visceral level. I finished it in a few hours without getting up to even refill my teacup.
Elissa Altman is a lesbian woman raised by starlet mother in New York City. (Her father was supportive and present and seems like a really good dad and person, but this story isn’t about him.) Her mother had a career in entertainment before meeting her first husband and having a child, Altman. For the rest of her life, she would remind everyone of who she used to be, all while reminding her daughter what she had given up for her.
From the start, it is wildly apparent the relationship between Altman and her mother is unhealthy under the best of circumstances. Her mother never made the shift in her mind that her days on TV were no longer. She lives as if the idea of her past self is all she was, is, and ever will be to the point Altman states, “She was a myth I searched for and never found.” Oh my god that sentence cuts me to the quick.
- “It was not the alcohol to which I was addicted; it was she…” About going to AA without an alcohol addiction.
- A lot of I loved you the most did everything for you what has anyone else done that I didn’t and couldn’t do for you
- It feels like my mother
- “The belief that whatever she was dishing out. I somehow deserved.”
Memorable Quotes
“Like the Centralia Mine fire, my mother and I have been burning for half a century.”
“It had been a choice: my mother’s life, or my own.”
“No family likes having a writer in their midst, says a close friend. … No family ever says Yay. A writer.”
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Title: Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing
Author: Elissa Altman
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9780399181580
