Pieces of My Mother
A Memoir
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
“A story that lingers in the heart long after the last page is turned.” —HOPE EDELMAN, bestselling author of Motherless Daughters and The Possibility of Everything
This provocative, poignant memoir of a daughter whose mother left her behind by choice begs the question: Are we destined to make the same mistakes as our parents?
One summer, Melissa Cistaro’s mother drove off without explanation Devastated, Melissa and her brothers were left to pick up the pieces, always tormented by the thought: Why did their mother abandon them?
Thirty-five years later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. After decades of hiding her painful memories, she has just days to find out what happened that summer and confront the fear she could do the same to her kids. But Melissa never expects to stumble across a cache of letters her mother wrote to her but never sent, which could hold the answers she seeks.
Haunting yet ultimately uplifting, Pieces of My Mother chronicles one woman’s quest to discover what drives a mother to walk away from the children she loves. Alternating between Melissa’s tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother’s final days, this captivating memoir reveals how our parents’ choices impact our own and how we can survive those to forge our own paths.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An undercurrent of unresolved hurt and anger runs through this affecting and deeply restrained narrative of a mother's abandonment of her children. San Francisco bookseller Cistaro alternates between 2003, when the author, the mother of two small children in L.A., was summoned suddenly over Christmas to her dying mother's rural home in Olympia, and the 1970s, when Cistaro and her two brothers were growing up in the care of their overburdened father. Cistaro was four when her hard-drinking, chain-smoking mother took off from their San Jose duplex in her baby-blue Dodge Dart to "take a break" from the responsibilities of her vivacious sons and daughter. Subsequently, the children rarely saw their mother, who lived from one boyfriend to the next, working occasionally as a cocktail hostess. They blamed themselves for making her leave, and while the boys spiraled into drug and alcohol abuse, the author became the "good girl" who never begged or made a scene. As her mother lay dying, Cistaro found a cache of "Letters never sent" in her mother's house, and though they help Cistaro sift through the wounded memories, there is no tidy reckoning between mother and daughter in this sad cycle of emotional devastation.
