Tea Leaves: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters

by Janet Mason

Tea Leaves is a lesbian-telling of the story of mothers and daughters, embarking when the narrator's mother is diagnosed with fourth-stage cancer. A dutiful daughter, the narrator proceeds to take care of her mother, 74-year-old Jane, and enters a deeper understanding of her own life through her mother’s stories.

Her grandmother (born in 1899) was a spinner in a textile mill and white-glove-wearing lady of her generation; her mother (born in 1920) was an office worker and feminist ahead of her time. The narrator has taken the foundation of her mother’s life and forged her own---taking her mother’s feminism one step further in becoming a lesbian and becoming the first in her family to graduate from college.

Tea Leaves is a story of gender and class, identity and sexuality. Equally pressing is the sheer labor of dealing with medical misdiagnosis and subsequent treatment of her mother, and the toll it takes on her own relationship as she spends increasing hours in conversation with the woman who gave her life. ---SheWired

Genres: Nonfiction

264 pages, Paperback

First published April 17, 2012

About the author

Janet Mason (born 1959) is an American writer and poet. Her poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and essays have appeared in literary journals including the Brooklyn Review and the Exquisite Corpse.

Her work includes the poetry collections When I Was Straight (Insight to Riot Press, 1995),
A Fucking Brief History of Fucking (Insight to Riot Press, 1992), and A Woman Alone (Cycladic Press, 2001), and the nonfiction work Tea Leaves: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters (Bella Books, 2012). Her novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage was published in August of 2022 by Thorned Heart Press.

Her novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders was published by Adelaide Books in 2018 and
The Unicorn, The Mystery was published by Adelaide Books in 2020.

She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very moving and sometimes difficult to read only because I've taken care of both my father and my mother as they grew older and became unable to care for themselves. Janet Mason captures so well the conflicts between caring for her mother's daily needs and yet granting her privacy and dignity, between reminiscing about the past, providing strength for each day, and trying to face her mother's imminent passing. Her writing is honest and clear, yet poetic and meditative. Many of her insights about working class life in Philadelphia shed light on the character of her mother, her grandmother and her father, and show how she developed as a woman and as a writer. This memoir must have been so painful to write, but it flows easily on the page and will last in my memory.

[Candace · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the story of the author’s mother’s illness and death. It is a meditation on her relationship to her mother and grandmother. It is a meditation on being the first woman in her family to graduate from college and into the white-collar world.

This book was hard to read because I’m watching my own mother’s dissolution and decline, but it’s an excellent book/memoir/meditation/biography.

Writing was excellent, editing was almost perfect. At points, it felt the least bit drawn out, and the ending was weaker than it might have been. Still, overall a most excellent work.

[willowdog]

Mason's personal memoir details the lives of her mother, aunt, and grandmother gleaned from conversations as she copes with her mother's final illness and the toll which this commitment to her mother's care takes on her relationship with her lover as this illness progresses.