American Daughter: Discovering My Mother

by Elizabeth Kendall

Book Overview

In this beautifully crafted book, Elizabeth Kendall tells the story of a family, of a passionate attachment between a mother and a daughter and the sudden tragedy that tears it apart. American Daughter is also a brilliant portrait of wellborn women's lives in cities and towns in the post-World War II era, as Kendall evokes how difficult it was to become anything other than an American daughter, which meant being a dependent woman.

Occupying...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812992105
• ISBN13: 9780812992106
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A compassionate and informed memoir found the story of Eliz

This story of a mother and a daughter strikes a balance between the personal and the historical in an interesting and informative way . Kendall's honesty , humor and intelligence make a personal story a universal one. I was moved by her descriptions of the intense mother-daughter bond and all of it's ramifications. I would recomend this book highly to anyone interested in women's roles in the last half of the twentieth century.

honest and absorbing

I found this book tremendously interesting and absorbing. It says important, perceptive things about all American mothers and daughters, while describing one specific mother/daughter relationship that was both heroic and tragic. An admirably honest, fascinating book.

Moving, tender tribute and social chronicle

This is the most poignant and introspective memoir this reader can recall having read. Kendall tells her personal and family story, intermingled with social and political history of the American 1950's and '60's, from the time she was born in 1947, until April 3, 1969, when, on the way to a spring vacation on the Gulf coast of Alabama, her mother was the only fatality in a car accident in which Kendall herself was the driver (She and her three brothers and a sister were all injured, but survived.). Kendall's mother, Betty, began her adult life as a young society matron, married at age nineteen to a charming but temperamental and bullying ex-Marine pilot and Harvard graduate (She herself had attended Vassar, but left college to marry, and never finished her degree.). She had six children, but despite the burden she bore at home managing her large family, she evolved into a civic leader and civil rights activist. In the meantime, she and her eldest daughter Elizabeth came to rely on each other as confidantes, companions, and friends. This book is a chronicle of white, middle class American life in the mid-twentieth century, as well as a loving tribute to a mother who was taken much too soon, and is for anyone who has lost a loved one.

A Memorable Memoir

American Daughter is not only a well-written and engaging memoir but it is almost a case history of women in the middle decades of the century. Kendall's mother came of age in the 1940's and Kendall in the 1960's; American Daughter shows the tremendous differences in the lives of women after two eventful decades. In reading this, I became attached to Kendall, her story and the people in it. American Daughter was touching and thought-provoking and WONDERFUL!