Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters
eBook - ePub

Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters

About this book

In these dense and startling stories, Maya Sonenberg telescopes seasons, decades, and generations in candid depictions of women's family lives.

What happens when the urge to ditch your family outpaces the desire to love them? The stories in Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, attempt to answer this question, heading straight for the messiness of domestic relationships and the constraints society places on women as they navigate their obligations. Daughters desert their rheumy-eyed elders in dusty museums, steal a mother's favorite teacup, or consider throwing their dead parents' nostalgia-riddled belongings out the window. Mothers conclude that they love one child more than their others. Fathers puzzle over a wife's inability to balance family and career or accuse a partner of blaming their child for her own misdeeds. Women mourn the children they decided not to have and fret over the legacy they'll leave the children they do have. But sometimes the generations reconcile or siblings manage to rescue each other. Love tears these people apart, but it mends them too.

The emotions expressed in these stories are combustible, both fraught and nuanced, uncontrollable and common, but above all often ignored or hushed because we're not supposed to be bored by our children or annoyed with our aged parents, even as we love them. The careful shapes of these stories adapted from fairy tales, verse, letters, or newspaper announcements, the surprise of their wordplay, and the blaze of their lyrical sentences allow them to dig into and contain all those messy emotions at the same time. In these works, constraint creates both understanding and fire.

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Yes, you can access Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters by Maya Sonenberg in PDF and/or ePUB format. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Title
  2. Copyright
  3. Dedication
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Childhood
  7. Pink Seascape
  8. Dark Season
  9. Four Phoebes
  10. Moon Child
  11. Seventh
  12. The Cathedral Is a Mouth
  13. Return of the Media Five
  14. The Other Road
  15. Painting Time
  16. Hunters and Gatherers
  17. The Arches, Our Home
  18. Six Views of Seattle
  19. Annunciation
  20. Disintegration
  21. Visitation
  22. On Seeing the Skeleton of a Whale in the Harvard Museum of Natural History
  23. Princess of Desire
  24. Bad Mother: A Story in Five Paragraphs
  25. Seven Little Stories about 1977
  26. Last Week, New Year
  27. Inebriate of Air
  28. Forest