This Is Your Mother: A Memoir

By Erika J. Simpson

Book Overview

Named a Best Memoir of 2025 (So Far) by BookPage and Real Simple * "A beautiful story about an extraordinary mother's gift of love and hope." --Jeannette Walls, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle * "Candid...Heartbreaking...Illuminating." --Oprah Daily

From "a writer who's absolutely going places" (Roxane Gay), a "bewitching...innovative" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) debut memoir about a mother-daughter relationship across cycles of poverty, separation, and illness, exploring how we forge identity in the face of imminent loss.

When Erika Simpson was growing up, her mother loomed large, almost biblical in her life. A daughter of sharecroppers, middle child of ten, her origin story served as a Genesis. Her departure from home and a cheating husband, pursuing higher education along the way a kind of Exodus. Her rules for survival, often repeated like the Ten Commandments, guided Erika's own journey into adulthood. And the most important rule? Throughout her life, Sallie Carol preached the power of a testimony--which often proved useful in talking her way out of a bind with bill collectors.

But where does a mother's story end and a daughter's begin? In this brave, illuminating memoir, Erika offers a joint recollection of their lives as they navigate the realities of destitution often left undiscussed. Her mother's uncanny ability to endure Job-like trials and manifest New Testament-style miracles made her seem invincible. But while our parents may start out as gods in our lives, through her mother's final months and fifth battle with cancer, Erika captures the moment you realize they are just people.

This gorgeously rendered story of a mother's life through her daughter's eyes weaves together a dual timeline, pulling inspiration from both scripture and pop culture as Erika moves through grief to a place of clarity where she can see who she is without her mom--and because of her.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1668024039
• ISBN13: 9781668024034
• Release Date: May 2025
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Funny and True

A commendable, sober, often humorous memoir, focusing on the tumultuous life of Sally Simpson, from the empathetic perspective of her daughter, as they navigate poverty, uncerainty, and sickness, staying together through it all.

Daughter of single mother’s candid take on her childhood and family dynamic

Thank you Ms.Simpson for a clear-eyed take on being raised by a struggling single mother. Thank you for honoring your mother’s strength, resilience and perseverance that got you from difficult birth circumstances to college. Both too often and for too long, black single mothers have been reviled and vilified in this country: your memoir begins to rectify that mistake. While much has been written( and published) from a fictional point of view about black female relationships, not enough has been published from inside that reality. This is a book that can be read in its entirety in a day. It is a story that will draw you in, page after page, because the people involved are alive- in all their humanity-on those pages. The reading public needs more books like this. Books that speak of and to the experiences of ordinary life and what we might have in common.