Projection
Encounters with My Runaway Mother
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4.4 • 17 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
2013 Governor General’s Literary Award — Shortlisted, Non-Fiction
2013 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust — Shortlisted, Non-Fiction
Projection is the story of this mother-daughter meeting in Brazil, of how two strangers, connected by little more than blood, spent ten days together trying to build a relationship.
In 1977, Priscila Uppal’s father drank contaminated water in Antigua and within 48 hours was a quadriplegic. Priscila was two years old. Five years later, her mother, Theresa, drained the family’s bank accounts and disappeared to Brazil. After two attempts to abduct her children, Theresa had no further contact with the family.
In 2002, Priscila happened on her mother’s website, which featured a childhood photograph of Priscila and her brother. A few weeks later, Priscila summoned the nerve to contact the woman who’d abandoned her.
The emotional reunion was alternately shocking, hopeful, humorous, and devastating, as Priscila came to realize that not only did she not love her mother, she didn’t even like her.
Projection is a visceral, precisely written, brutally honest memoir that takes a probing look at a very unusual mother-daughter relationship, yet offers genuine comfort to all facing their own turbulent and unresolved familial relationships.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Priscila Uppal’s wildly inventive account of tracking down the “runaway mother” who abandoned her when she was eight is like no book you’ve read before. Written with astonishing honesty and a poet’s triumphant flair for language, Projection is a finalist for the 2013 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. It’s part memoir, part travelogue, and part character study. It’s also an exploration of films that resonate with the author as she tries to make sense of the manic, self-centered, movie-obsessed, ailing woman she reconnects with in Brazil after two decades of radio silence. Uppal has written an astonishing, sweeping book about “mothers and daughters, disappearances and reunions, family bonds and family secrets, travel, trauma, grief, art, and the nature of imagination.”
Customer Reviews
So honest, so unreal
Never before have I read something so poetically written on a story so unjust. My heart stirred, my thoughts constantly swirled in and out of her truth and what I know to be mine. I had to lift my eyes off of the page of unbelieving words many times, to pause and to redefine perspective. Pricilla's genuine and haunting "gift of truth" has given me a courage and a spirit to continue to be a better person, a better friend, and a better mother. Because it really matters.