The Buzz...About Books

This Sunday, May 11th, is Mother's Day.   Last year, in Memoirs (Momoirs?) for Mother's Day,  M. Elwood listed some great books by mothers about their experiences of being a mom.  This year, for a different point of view, here are some recent memoirs by adult children about their own special, if often challenging, mothers.

Canadian gossip columnist and talk-show host Elaine "Lainey" Lui has recently published a memoir about her mother and Lainey's  somewhat unusual childhood.  In Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's A Daughter To Do?: A Memoir (Sort Of),  In this memoir, Elaine talks about the variety of unusual advice and warnings used to teach her about hard work, humility, love and friendship, family loyalty, style and deportment, and finding one's own voice.  Along the way, Elaine poignantly reveals how her mother earned the nickname "Tsiahng Gai" or "squawking chicken" growing up in Hong Kong, enduring her own hard times and rising above them.
  • eBook.

In Mom & Me & Mom Maya Angelou tells the story of her indomitable mother, Vivian Baxter, and the reasons why she sent three-year old Maya and her brother away to live with their grandmother.  It is also the story of their reunion, a decade later. 
• Audiobook
• eBook
• eAudiobook

Projection: Encounters With My Runaway Mother: A Memoir by Priscila Uppal.   When Priscila was seven, her mother disappeared to Brazil leaving her and her brother to be raised by their quadriplegic father.  Twenty years later,  Priscila found her mother's website and contacted her.  Their emotional reunion was alternately shocking, hopeful, humorous, and devastating.  Projection was short-listed for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust for Nonfiction. Book Buzz had an online chat with Priscila on Tuesday, May 6th.  If you missed it, have a look at the Priscila Uppal Online Chat transcript.
* As part of the Eh! List Author's Series, Priscila will be appearing at the North York Central Library on May 13th and Barbara Frum on May 21st.  
• eBook

Almost A Great Escape: A Found Story by Tyler Trafford.  Starting with an album of old letters and photographs that was discovered after his mother's death, Trafford goes on a journey to learn about his mother's secret and relationship with a Norwegian pilot, who was one of only three prisoners to return home after The Great Escape.   His search takes him across Canada and then to Norway, hoping to learn more about this unknown part of his mother's life.  For more details, have a look at the transcipt of the Book Buzz Online Chat with Tyler Trafford from November 2013.  
• eBook

Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain.  Years after his mother died, apparen'tly at the hands of her fifth husband, Justin began a search to make sense of how his mother, a onetime army paratrooper and the type of woman who would stand up to any man, was unable to stand up to the men she was in love with.  He confronted people from his past and delved into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother's life and death.
• eBook
• eAudiobook

Mother, Daughter, Me: A Memoir by Katie Hafner.   Katie urged her mother, Helen, to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie's teenage daughter.   Soon they embarked on an experiment in intergenerational living that was filled with the land mines from memories of her paren'ts' painful divorce, of her mother's drinking, of dislocating moves back and forth across the country, and of Katie's own widowhood and bumpy recovery.  How these three women from such different generations learn to navigate their challenging, turbulent, and ultimately healing journey is, by turns, heartbreaking and funny.
• eBook