Is this a great cover?
Linda Joy
Myer’s memoir, Don’t Call Me Mother: A
Daughter’s Journey form Abandonment to Forgiveness, totally fulfills her
memoir writing axioms: write to heal, write your truth, write to bring your
dark stories into the light.
From the
minute I picked up this book and started reading I was hooked. Her poetically
visceral words drew me in and never let me go. Even when I had to take a break
from her increasingly dark story of being abandoned by her mother and living
with an abusive and controlling grandmother, her words stuck with me. They
still do. I couldn’t believe how this woman could have lived through such a childhood
and come out alive, whole, and productive.
Emerging as
a viable adult was a grueling process. She revisited the cities and farm land where
she grew up, she walked through the houses where the abusive experiences
occurred, she interviewed family members to verify her memories were real, she
made peace with her sexually abusive cousin, and she sat with her dying mother by
her hospice bedside and actually forgave her. In the end, she reached her goal of not
perpetuating the cycle of abandonment she and her mother both experienced.
Besides
being taken in by the compelling story I became enthralled with the music of Linda
Joy’s words. She brings in all the senses. She uses metaphor like a master. I
experienced the drumbeat and whistles of the always arriving and departing
trains, the burgundy and rust colors of the symphonic music she played as a
young girl, her grandmother’s slaps on her little girl’s face, the belt strokes
on her bare behind in her foster mother’s basement, her father’s inappropriate
kisses on her lips, and the heat of the mud that she and her adult daughter
sunk into while together at a Calistoga spa.
Ultimately
this is a memoir about love and forgiveness. It became that because Linda Joy
worked hard at it. She always hoped for her mother to acknowledge her and love
her, and almost by brute force hope is fulfilled. Through years of therapy and
becoming a therapist herself, Linda Joy finally found peace and forgiveness and
learned how to be a loving mother and grandmother herself.
I
recommend this book to all memoir writers. Linda Joy provides tips for memoir
writing at the end, but the reading of this book is a lesson in itself. She
writes the dark and secretive truth. She doesn’t let up on her readers. She
says, “…our memoir keeps asking us to open out, to bear witness, and to tell
the truth as we know it while coming to terms with what we can bear and how
much it might cost to share it.”
Linda Joy
Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D.
is the president and founder of the National
Association of Memoir Writers and Co-President of the Women's National Book
Association, SF. She's the author of Don't
Call Me Mother--A Daughter's Journey from Abandonment to Forgiveness
(SheWrites Press, February 2013); The
Power of Memoir – How to Write Your Healing Story, and A workbook The Journey of Memoir: The Three Stages of
Memoir Writing to be released in 2013. Linda Joy co-teaches the
program Write your Memoir in Six Months with Brooke Warner and is a speaker,
coach, and online memoir teacher.
Linda Joy’s prizes for fiction, memoir
and poetry include: First Prize, Jessamyn West Fiction Contest; Finalist, San
Francisco Writing Contest for Secret Music, a novel about the Kindertransport;
First Prize, poetry, East of Eden Contest, and First Prize Carol Landauer Life
Writing Contest.
