Reviews

“Do anything,” pleads Eleanor Vincent with the surgeon, as she hovers over her daughter’s broken, bandaged body in the ICU. “This child is my life.” Eleanor Vincent’s memoir, Swimming With…

“It has come to my attention that children have become the center of our universe,” begins The Three-Martini Playdate: A Happy Guide to Practical Parenting, by Christie Mellor. To which…

As Elizabeth Oness opens her debut novel Departures, a mother of three grown daughters has just disappeared. “I’m leaving the country for a while. Don’t look for me. Don’t worry,”…

In April 1990 I happened to be in Minneapolis, considering a graduate program at the University of Minnesota. I was walking across the campus, wondering about the community I might…

In 1917, Edith Wharton wrote the novel Summer. Set in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, Summer tells the story of Charity Royall, a teenage foster child who finds herself…

In the introduction to her new collection of brief memoirs, Margo Perin explains that her book is meant to remedy the dearth of literary explorations of the “shadow side of…

When my son was born, I was obsessed with documenting each stage of his life. I shot hours of videotape of him chewing his toe, torturing the cat, slapping the…

In her new book, Mothering Without A Map: The Search for the Good Mother Within (January, 2004), Kathryn Black shows how emotionally wounded daughters can travel down a different path…

It’s a cruel world. The many compete for limited resources controlled by the few, time marches on, and things don’t work out as we had planned. In a cruel world,…

My one-year-old son finally slept through the night. Instead of feeling relief, I was tense with worry. “Do you think he’s okay?” I asked my husband. “Should I go in…

In her new book Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts, feminist scholar Fiona Giles takes on the image problem of breasts in this double-D obsessed society and “outs” breasts…