My Mother Never Dies: Stories

By Claire Castillon

"Nasekomoe" i "Ne meshajte serdechku lyubit'" - dve kollektsii korotkih rasskazov ot "ocharovatel'nogo monstra" sovremennoj frantsuzskoj literatury Kler Kastijon. Ee novelly hochetsya sravnit' s... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151014264
• ISBN13: 9780151014262
• Release Date: February 2009
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Length: 163 Pages
• Weight: 3.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

disturbing

Nineteen stunning, disturbing short stories delve into the complex relationship between mothers and daughters. In My Mother Never Dies, the literary provocateur Claire Castillon dissects the darkest aspects of the relationship between mothers and daughters. A woman tries so hard to be friends with her daughter that she begins to revert to her own adolescence; another woman finds her mother engaged in an illicit affair with a man they both know too well; a daughter rattles off all the reasons why she's disgusted with her invalid mother but realizes through her haze of teenage hatred that she is losing the only person who tells her the truth. Stunning, shocking, unflinching, and ultimately tender, My Mother Never Dies forces us to look at the worst and best of mothers and daughters. Like the work of Miranda July and A.M.Homes, Castillon won't let us avert our gaze from the terrible and true any more than from the beautiful and true-- because it all reveals the depth of our need for each other.

An Antidote to the Smiling Mommy Stories

These short, sharp stories are almost a sucker punch to the images of the glowing mom, or the yummy mummy, or the perfectly happy mother-daughter pairs, the ones who refer to themselves as best friends. Castillon captures women's ambivalence about parenthood, even hatred of it, as well as the complexity of being a daughter with tight prose that makes you both long for more to each story, and thrilled at the exquisiteness packed into each one. Chilling and snappy, and nothing like what you'll see in the tabloids.

A story for all Mothers and Daughters to read.

Some of the stories were difficult to read because of the content (incest, infidelity) yet each story has love between Mother and Daughter. Sometimes that love was hard to find (much like real life), but it was always there.

She knows right where to rip.

If you watch a very capable seamstress handle fabric, she will move, drape and assess her yardage. And then, without ever having seemed to measure, she'll take it in her two hands and rip. She always rips it exactly where she should. This writer has that same gift. Every story in here is good and at least half are excellent. They are harsh, rife with reversal and ambivalence. Be warned, this is not a feelgood examination of the mother/daughter connection. It's more of a cutting into of that connection. I found it riveting and recommend it to people who want to be unsettled, challenged and repeatedly creeped out by how tangled and knotty the ties are that bind mothers and daughters.

These stories will shake you

This is first english translation of the French writer Claire Castillon's work. Book compiles short contemporary stories about mother/daughter relationships. Each story is unique and compelling. They touch up on issues such as: motherhood, incest, death, long term disease, boundaries or the lack thereof. I knew from the start that I will be hooked to this book because the first story was absolutely shocking. You will be able to read these stories in a couple of hours and they will cover absolutely every possible aspect of mother daughter relationship known to mankind. Ms. Catillon is a young French writer with a very bright future ahead of her. Must read this book!