Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss

In the tradition of Passages  and My Mother, My Self, this  unique, personal, and ground-breaking New  York Times best-seller -- the first of  its kind -- explores the profound pain of mother  loss among women and is available here for the  first time in paperback. "When my mother died,  I knew no woman my age who had experienced mother  loss. I felt utterly and irrevocably alone. In  college, where new friends knew only as much about  me as I was willing to reveal, I told few people  my mother had died. I searched the university  library and local bookstoresfor writings about  mother loss. In each book I found about  mother-daughter relationships, I quickly flipped ahead to the  chapter about a mother's death, but discovered  they all assumed the reader would be in her forties  or fifties when her mother dies. I was eighteen."  --excerpt from Motherless  Daughters.

Not only for motherless  daughters, but for all women who want to better  understand the mother/daughter relationship, this  beautifully written work inspired an Anna  Quindlen column; appeared in the New York Times, Ingram,  Barnes & Noble, and San Francisco best-seller  lists; and received an extraordinary amount of  media attention including a feature on The Today  Show. Hope Edelman lost her mother to breast cancer  when she was eighteen. Unable to find a book to  help her understand and cope with that loss, she  decided to write her own. She posted notices  asking motherless women to share their experiences  with her, and was unprepared for both the number of  responses she received, and for their emotional  intensity. Eventually meeting with 92 women and  surveying 154 by mail, Hope was able to compare how  mother loss affects daughters differently  depending on their ages, their relationships to their  mothers, their father's attitude, and the support  or dependency of siblings. But more important  Hope's book explores what these women share -- a void  in their lives they cannot seem to fill. Their  common experiences and insights will help  motherless daughters, and those who care about them, come  to better understand how this painful loss shapes  lives forever.