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.