Seven realistic portraits of mothers & daughters in literature

Jill Talbot is the author of The Last Year: Essays (2023). She’s also the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir (2015) and Loaded: Women and Addiction (2007), the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together (2008), and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (2012). Her craft book, The Essay Form(s), will be published in 2024.

At Lit Hub Talbot tagged seven realistic portraits of mothers and daughters in literature, including:

The opening chapter of Sarah Perry’s After the Eclipse: A Memoir begins, “I want to tell you about my mother.” The memoir alternates between chapters labeled “before” and “after,” a reference to the night Perry’s mother was murdered in their home as young Sarah, only twelve, hid in her bedroom. The memoir subverts the true crime genre by focusing on the life of the victim, rather than the perpetrator or the details of the crime—casting a glow on the relationship between Perry and her single mother. In the first chapter, across six pages, Perry explains:

My mother was full of energy and passion. She believed in the soul of housecats and in the melancholy of rainy days. She believed in hard work, and the energy she poured into her job—hand-sewing shoes at a factory—seemed boundless . . . She was graced with bright red hair, a golden tone of red I’ve seen only a handful of times….In the short Maine summer, she sunbathed for hours . . we would drive to the ocean just south of Portland. Her favorite thing to collect from the beach was sand dollars, and I loved walking up and down the yellow sand and finding them for her….The clicking of her high heels on our kitchen floor meant happiness to me. . . In her romantic selections, she could have done better, and she could have done worse. She was often imperfect in her own love….Because of her, I will always believe love is possible.

When we write about those we have lost, we have to show readers what has been lost, and Perry’s memoir achieves this in a way that drew out an ache in my chest as I read it through her elegant elegy, not only to her mother, but to the loss of beach walks and car dancing, shared salon visits and sunbathing, the living and the laughter once shared by mother and daughter.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue