The Mother Who Stayed
Stories
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In nine strikingly perceptive stories set miles and decades apart, Laura Furman mines the intricate, elusive lives of mothers and daughters—and of women who long for someone to nurture. Meet Rachel, a young girl desperate for her mother’s unbridled attention, knowing that soon she’ll have to face the world alone; Marian, a celebrated novelist who betrays the one person willing to take care of her as she is dying—her unclaimed “daughter”; and Dinah, a childless widow uplifted by the abandoned, century-old diaries of Mary Ann, a mother of eleven.
The Mother Who Stayed is an homage to the timeless, primal bond between mother and child and a testament that the relationships we can’t define can be just as poignant, memorable, and inspiring as those determined by blood. Tender and insightful, Furman’s stories also bravely confront darker realities of separation and regret, death and infidelity—even murder. Her vividly imagined characters and chiseled prose close the gap between generations of women as they share their wisdom almost in chorus: Although our lives will end, we must cherish the sanctity of each day and say, as did Mary Ann ages ago, “I done what I could.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A nicely hewn collection of new stories by PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories series editor Furman (The Glass House) pursues three family cycles with a hard focus on the mothers. The first, most engaging trio begins with "The Eye," an enchanted summer grouping of three New York families in the country during the 1950s and the looming pall of their estrangement. Rachel, a youngest daughter, is devastated by the untimely death of her mother in "The Hospital Room." In "The Thief" Rachel deals with her friend, Caitlin, a wily girl who lets Rachel be accused of stealing a pearl necklace belonging to Caitlin's mother. The second trio involves a famous novelist and poet with an importunate, unsympathetic nature; her biographer, who tries to dig up the truth about her giving her daughter up for adoption; and the now grown-up daughter who meets the dying grande dame for the first time. The title story, which closes the final trio, finds a silver-headed widow the product of a motherless home employing as strength and solace the diaries of a late-19th-century woman who bore 16 children and devoted her life to caring for them. Furman's prose ambles sinuously, in unexpected directions, and has a quiet, sure effect.
