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Finding Myself in My Family's Fractured Past
by Tracy Clark-Flory
From the journalist and author of Want Me (an NPR Best Book of the Year) comes a "tender, revelatory, and deeply moving" (Amanda Montei, Touched Out) story of family secrets, sisterhood, and the importance of untangling all that we inherit from our mothers.
Tracy Clark-Flory had a sister out there, somewhere. She knew that her mom, Deb, was sent to a home for unwed mothers as a pregnant teenager in the Sixties. After placing her baby for adoption, Deb was committed to a mental institution in her grief. Decades later, she had Tracy, who grew up as an only child longing for her sister. Now, in her thirties and a mother herself, Tracy takes a DNA test in hopes of finding her sister—and she does.
Newly connected with her half-sister Kathy, both daughters start asking questions about the past that their mom, who had died years earlier, could no longer answer. Tracy sets out to make sense of what happened back in 1965. She learns that their mom was pulled into a racist and sexist system designed to turn "bad girls" into proper women and wives. Tracy realizes that her own life has been profoundly shaped by her mom's past, but she also uncovers a bigger story about patriarchal control, mother-daughter dynamics, and the way that shame keeps us divided—both within ourselves and from each other.
Blending powerful memoir with cultural criticism, My Mother's Daughter is a moving, intimate tale of traumatic inheritance and intergenerational healing.
"A trenchant and moving memoir about adoption and systemic racism." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
""A stirring family history… reckoning with race, power, privilege, and women's roles... Clark-Flory writes movingly… the result is a well-researched, engaging narrative." —Booklist (starred review)
"What a beautiful, immersive book. My Mother's Daughter isn't a mystery, but it reads a little like one, as Tracy Clark-Flory deftly peels back layer after layer of her own family's story, laying bare much about this country's history, as well as its relationship to sex, shame, women, race, and the durability of love itself. I cried!" —Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad and All the Single Ladies
"Tracy Clark-Flory connects the dots between her own life, the reader's, and the larger culture, turning the family story of a pregnant girl caught by the social forces of her time—around gender, race, class—into the story of all women: who we are as daughters, how we carry the relationships to our mothers long after they are gone, and how we are shaped, generationally, by the limits on our personal, sexual, and reproductive freedom. My Mother's Daughter is the kind of book you can't wait to talk about with your friends." —Peggy Orenstein, New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex
This information about My Mother's Daughter was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tracy Clark-Flory is a journalist, essayist, and author of the memoir Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire, an NPR Best Book of the Year. She has written for Cosmopolitan, The Cut, Elle, Esquire, Marie Claire, Glamour, The Guardian, The Washington Post, WIRED, Women's Health, and many others. Previously, she was a senior staff writer at Jezebel and a staff writer at Salon. She writes a weekly newsletter and cohosts Dire Straights, a feminist podcast critiquing hetero love, sex, politics, and culture. You can find more at TracyClarkFlory.com.
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