My Mother's Daughter: A Memoir

By Rona Maynard

Book Overview

Personal memories of the sort her Chatelaine readers adored -- a remarkable life story seen through the window of her relationship with her mother. Every woman's relationship with her mother is special. Yet everyone will recognize some parts of another woman's story, especially if it is told as honestly and as sensitively as Rona Maynard tells it here. As a little girl, Maynard soon came to see that her family was not an ordinary one. Her father, Max, was an artist and an alcoholic. Her mother was Fredelle Maynard, a brilliant academic who could not get a teaching job because she was a woman. Instead she became a writer -- the author of Raisins and Almonds -- and, above all, a driving, loving, ambitious, overpowering mother. In her shadow (and that of younger sister Joyce, who went off at eighteen to live with J.D. Salinger) Rona took time to blossom as a writer and editor in Toronto. This book takes us through her career, step by step, including the miseries of being accused by her son's teachers -- and her own mother -- of being a bad mother, overly concerned with her own career. Rona's strong, direct style will ring true for every working woman. Through the magic of her writing, she gives a clear-eyed and affectionate account of her relationship with a demanding, loving mother. I said to my father, "You don't live here any more. This is Mother's house, not yours. It's time for you to go." My father cursed me. He shook his fist. Then he left and never came back. --From My Mother's Daughter

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0771055552
• ISBN13: 9780771055553
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Emblem Editions
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.7" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Another view of a remarkable woman and her family

It isn't often that three members of a single family write their memoirs--in fact, the only instance I can recall are the books published by the three women of the Maynard family. Fredelle Bruser Maynard wrote innumerable women's magazine pieces as well as "Raisins and Almonds," the story of her girlhood in rural Canada. She followed it up with a more revealing volume, "The Tree of Life," published soon before her diagnosis with terminal brain cancer. Joyce Maynard, the prolific American novelist and journalist, discussed her family in book form in 1998 in "At Home in the World." Her older sister, the wry, reserved Rona, first chose a career as an editor, not as a writer. "My Mother's Daughter" is a tender, frank, marvelous discussion of how Rona grew up with a forceful, frustrated mother. Fredelle had a Ph.D. in English literature from Radcliffe, yet was able to find teaching jobs only spottily during and after her first pregnancy at the end of the 1940s. Her husband, Max, also was frustrated: a gifted painter, he received real recognition for his art only toward the end of his life. He supported his family (just barely) teaching English at the University of New Hampshire with no more than a bachelor's degree. His alcoholism affected all three Maynard women profoundly, as Rona describes. She married and became a mother quite young, juggling university classes, and eventually became editor of Canada's foremost women's magazine, Chatelaine. Rona insisted that the position was "a ten-year job," and kept her word: resigning after a decade to pursue a career as a writer and speaker. In time, she found her own true voice by listening to other women's stories. When interviewing women for magazine articles, she notes, her subjects were most likely to ask, "What did the other women say?" Yet in this memoir, Rona does not hide behind them, demonstrating how her journey as an editor, writer, wife, mother, sister, grandmother, and friend molded her clear, empathetic voice. It is definitely one worth listening to: "My Mother's Daughter" is the best memoir I've read in quite some time, and Rona's website (www.ronamaynard.com) offers up frequent--and most welcome--food for thought. This book may take a little searching-out, but it is well worth the effort. Five stars, and then some.