3.75 stars. there is so much pain in this book, but also joy and forgiveness and compassion. and understanding, which maybe is so often missing stories like this, about parental relationship and trauma in particular.

it would have been hard to predict, from wilson's childhood and early relationship with her mother, their later connection and adult relationship. it was so satisfying as a reader to see them come to that; i can only imagine how wonderful it was for them personally, that they got to that point.

i was really glad to read about the feminist circles and groups that they both found themselves in and to read about what it was like to live through that time of the early women's movement. i often think it must have been an amazing period to live through and to come to consciousness in, and so i enjoyed getting a little taste of that.

i loved that while gloria didn't get to write her story before she died, chana basically did. this isn't a dual memoir, technically (if that is a technical thing at all), but this is also gloria's story, and i'm so glad that chana told it along with her own. it's interesting that the early part of the book portrays her as, maybe, damaged internally or weak or unable to handle herself in the world. turns out that it's society that can't handle her, and that she's such an incredibly strong woman, as is her daughter.

this is powerful - about mental illness, about society, about being true to yourself, about forgiveness, about working hard to make yourself better. ( )

I picked up this book after hearing an amazing reading by the author. It's an intense, enthralling story.

Trapped in a suffocating marriage in the 1950s, Chana Wilson's mother, Gloria, tries to kill herself, but fails. By a twist of fate, the gun jams. She is quickly taken away. Going in and out of psychiatric hospitals during the peak of electroshock therapy, she tries, again and again, to die. Wilson describes the distress of a child losing her mother, finding a mother who isn't really there, taking care of a mother who can't be trusted to take her medication properly or put herself to bed. A mother who at any moment may disappear.

It's only later, when Wilson (then called Karen) comes out to her mother as a lesbian, that she learns about Gloria's affair with another woman, about the heartbreak and homophobia, about the therapy meant to cure her. The women's liberation movement is gaining momentum, and as a lesbian feminist, Karen is in the thick of it; pretty soon, so is Gloria. As Gloria rediscovers the joy of life, Karen grows close to her mother again, finding both a best friend and a mother, the figure so lacking since she was a second grader. And though Wilson could have romanticized their relationship, she doesn't; painting a clear picture of her anger and pain, mixed in with her love for her mother.

Wilson brings the period alive; reading it, I wished I could have been there. Her careful use of detail makes it feel very real. Laura Nyro's "Stoned Soul Picnic" plays in the background as Karen and her first girlfriend kiss for the first time. At college, Karen sends her mother a copy of the classic anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful. Later, when Karen, then Chana, is living in the East Bay, when she has an awkward encounter at a concert at La Peña in Berkeley. This trove of details is especially satisfying if you're familiar with any of the places Wilson's lived: New Jersey, New York, the Bay Area.

Though the book spans forty years, Wilson narrates with an emotional depth that makes it feel urgent throughout, hard to put down. It's a memoir of Wilson's life, but it's ultimately Gloria's story, from the early years of her marriage to her death from cancer. After her diagnosis, she declares: "I'm going to lick this thing, and I am going to live to write a book about my life." Although Gloria never does write that book, her daughter's memoir offers a beautiful tribute to her legacy.

Chana Wilson had an incredibly hard childhood. Her mother, Gloria, was often suicidal, in and out of mental hospitals, heavily altered by electroshock and psychiatric drugs. For one year of grade school, her father was away in England, leaving her alone with her mom. During that year, Gloria attempted suicide twice. Chana cared for her mom, cleaned up after those attempts, and never told her dad about them.

Later, when Chana was a young woman, she learned that her mother was a lesbian. Her depression began when her woman lover ended their relationship and said they both needed to "be good wives and open their legs for their husbands". Medical professionals tried to "help" her by getting her to adjust to her heterosexual marriage. This sense that she was broken, and this denial of her core self, crushed Gloria for a long time.

But the human spirit is a powerful thing. In the 1970s, Chana and Gloria both came out as lesbians and had an exciting, glorious time riding the wave of cultural change and liberation. Over time, they healed much of the hurt in themselves and between them.

This book is many things. It's a history of social change, from the repression of the 50s through the social revolutions of the 1960s and 70s to Chana's state-recognized same-sex marriage in the 21st century. Chana was in the thick of these revolutions, active first in the antiwar movement and then the women's and gay liberation movements. She did a lot of classic hippie things, hitchhiking, crossing the country in a VW van, living on the land in northern California, being under FBI surveilance...that part was vivid cultural history.

It's also a portrait of a mother-daughter relationship, from the reversal of her childhood, where the young Chana has to put her heavily medicated mother to bed and be sure to stub out her cigarette, through coming out, communication, and healing, to caring for her mother again in Gloria's final illness.

Finally, and in some ways for me most powerfully, it's a detailed tracing of Chana's own internal emotional experiences and growth. Some of the moments that grabbed me most were the ones where Chana describes the actual physical sensations of emotion, conscious and unconscious, in her body -- the heavy tightness that comes when we have fears we won't name, the lightness that comes with freedom. Tightness in the chest, the rush of blood in the temples...it struck me that she must have really taken herself back into these moments in her mind to write the book.

I found this a very hard book to put down. It's an exciting, true-to-life, loving, difficult book. I recommend it highly.

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Captivating and compelling memoir. I couldn't really read the last few chapters because they just ripped my heart out. ( )

A harrowing yet fundamentally affirming memoir of a mother and daughter coming to terms with their own sexualities. Becomes more of a critique of women's medical/psychiatric treatment in the 50s but blossoms into a sweet non-traditional family story. ( )