Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss

by Hope Edelman

In the tradition of Passages   and My Mother, My Self , this  unique, personal, and ground-breaking New  York Times best-seller -- the first of  its kind -- explores the profound pain of mother  loss among women and is available here for the  first time in paperback. "When my mother died,  I knew no woman my age who had experienced mother  loss. I felt utterly and irrevocably alone. In  college, where new friends knew only as much about  me as I was willing to reveal, I told few people  my mother had died. I searched the university  library and local bookstoresfor writings about  mother loss. In each book I found about  mother-daughter relationships, I quickly flipped ahead to the  chapter about a mother's death, but discovered  they all assumed the reader would be in her forties  or fifties when her mother dies. I was eighteen."  --excerpt from Motherless   Daughters.

Not only for motherless  daughters, but for all women who want to better  understand the mother/daughter relationship, this  beautifully written work inspired an Anna  Quindlen column; appeared in the New York Times , Ingram,  Barnes & Noble, and San Francisco best-seller  lists; and received an extraordinary amount of  media attention including a feature on The Today  Show. Hope Edelman lost her mother to breast cancer  when she was eighteen. Unable to find a book to  help her understand and cope with that loss, she  decided to write her own. She posted notices  asking motherless women to share their experiences  with her, and was unprepared for both the number of  responses she received, and for their emotional  intensity. Eventually meeting with 92 women and  surveying 154 by mail, Hope was able to compare how  mother loss affects daughters differently  depending on their ages, their relationships to their  mothers, their father's attitude, and the support  or dependency of siblings. But more important  Hope's book explores what these women share -- a void  in their lives they cannot seem to fill. Their  common experiences and insights will help  motherless daughters, and those who care about them, come  to better understand how this painful loss shapes  lives forever.

Genres: Nonfiction, Grief, Psychology, Self Help, Death, Memoir, Mental Health

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Hope Edelman is the internationally acclaimed author of eight nonfiction books, including the bestsellers Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers, as well as the upcoming book, The Aftergrief. She has lectured extensively on the subjects of early loss and also on nonfiction writing in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Glamour, Child, Seventeen, Real Simple, Parents, Writer’s Digest, and Self, and her original essays have appeared in many anthologies. Her work has received a New York Times notable book of the year designation and a Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction. She lives in Los Angeles and Iowa City, where she can be found every July teaching at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Reviews

[Meredith Holley · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mother died the day before my first law school final. Hope Edelman says, in this book, that partway through college she had a weird urge to walk up to strangers and tell them, “My mother died when I was seventeen,” because she recognized that this fact about herself, this fact that alienated her from the people around her, had become totally definitive about who she was. A girl can’t tell people that her mother died because it brings only fear and pity, it doesn’t solve anything to talk about it. But, at the same time, no one knows you without knowing that you don’t, that you didn’t, have a mother. For the past few months I have had this weird compulsion, too, to walk up to people and just say, “My mother died the day before my first law school final.”

But, what do I mean by that? It sounds like I want to be pathetic or impressive, and I don’t mean either of those things. It sounds like I conquered life that day, or like I lost all hope of being a woman. It is ambivalent and loaded. I know that even talking about reading and reviewing a book that is “self-help,” even if it is about grieving, is loaded, too. It has a pastel cover and a sentimental name, but I kind of appreciate that about the book. It looks like only the fierce of heart, those who can handle reading sentiment without shame, should attempt this book, and I think that’s good. I think I benefited from waiting to read it until I felt like I could really listen to a sentimentally titled book without sneering.

At the same time, I don’t think emotions mature themselves, so I always remind myself that I’m probably not going to get very far sitting back and waiting for mine to suddenly do so. It would be like waiting for myself to spontaneously become a stellar lawyer without ever actually going to law school or reading any books about law. Or, it would be like waiting for myself to spontaneously become a marathon runner. Not all self-help books have anything worthwhile about emotional growth to say, but neither do all legal scholars have anything worthwhile to say about the law or all personal trainers about marathons. I don’t think the gaining-skills-by-doing-nothing strategy works with almost anything, so I’m pretty enthusiastic about smart books about emotions and spirituality. I’m pretty enthusiastic about counseling, too – it’s like getting a massage for the soul.

I’m being really long winded about saying that, while I don’t think every time is the right time to read this book, I do think probably everyone would benefit from reading this book at some point. I wish I had been prepared to read it sooner. The book is directed to women, obviously, but Edelman makes the point that we, women or men, mourn rejection (in whatever form, whether death or emotional or physical abandonment) from our same-sex parent differently than we mourn rejection from our opposite-sex parent, and the book is mostly about that. Even if you have not experienced rejection from a same-sex parent, I think it would still give you perspective on what you gain from that parent that you might not even be aware of. It also might give you perspective on why (at least some of us) women who have lost our mothers act the way we do when we have not known how to mourn.

The book is arguably as sentimental as its title, even just because it is about death and emotions, but it is so smart. Edelman surveys over a hundred women who lost their mothers at various ages, and she tells their stories in an organized, clear layout. She also talks about many famous women, including Virginia Woolf, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Madonna, and how they have reacted to the deaths of their mothers. In addition to hearing and recounting all of these stories, Edelman obviously did some pretty serious research into other studies about women and grief, and about family relationships in general.

For me, much of this book was practically a miracle. If you don’t mind my spoiling what the biggest revelation of the book was for me, I will tell you about it right now. I will not say it as clearly as Edelman, though, so you should still get her take on it, and it’s probably only a small part of the book, even though it was life changing to me. It is that when a mother rejects a daughter, whether she does it intentionally or unintentionally, such as through illness and death, the daughter starts to look for the mother relationship in all of her relationships. One woman in the book described it as a “cocoon,” another described it as “that family feeling,” which is something I have said, at least in my head, a lot. The daughter starts to think that any successful relationship ultimately has that particular form of intimacy – that the intimacy from a mother is successful intimacy.

I literally thought this. I had no idea that, ultimately, all intimacy, all sense of family, isn’t necessarily that feeling of a little daughter with her mother. I had always thought that because my relationships, whether friendships or romances, are not like that, it was like “people, iz doin it rong,” and that once I figured out how to do it right, my relationships would feel like that. I have been jealous of my friends, men or women, who have families (read: friends who have mothers) and their ability to do relationships right, shown just by the fact that they have a mother. And this intensity has created a completely unfair expectation for all of my relationships because then every time I experience rejection, it is the loss of my mom, the loss of my family, all over again. It means that friends living their own lives, not focused on me one hundred percent of the time, translated to rejection, and not just rejection, but also the death of my relationship with my mother all over again. It was basically a miracle to hear that I could treat the loss of that nurturing, cocoon relationship, that mother-child relationship, as a total loss, and not let that loss pile on to every other lost relationship I ever have. It sounds weird, but it is a relief to know it is not failure that no friend ever turns out to be my mom.

*facepalm* I totally love this book.

______________________________

So, that concludes the review portion of your time, and the rest of this shall be a story with no real reviewing purposes in mind. It is more my experience of being a motherless daughter than a critique of the book. Even though my personal story, like anyone's personal story, is not the same as most other people's, it was really incredible to hear how similar my reaction to losing my mother is to the reactions of other women who lost theirs.

My mom died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, but as far as I am concerned, I lost my mom about twenty years before she actually died. I was six when my family first started listening to meditation tapes from the Foundation of Human Understanding, and when I was eight, we moved to Selma, Oregon, to join what we would later refer to as “The Cult.” Really, most of the diets or clubs or churches my parents joined ended up taking on a cultish quality once my parents got mixed up with them. First, that diet/club/church was the only thing that could save us from certain doom; later, it was evil. The Foundation is basically a Judeo-Christian group that teaches men how to stand up to the domineering women around them. It teaches them how to take the world back from the invidious control of women, and it teaches women how to overcome their natural tendencies toward evil (ya know, Eve, and all that).

This is my recollection of The Cult. If you look on the website, it mostly looks like stuff you’d get out of The Secret, but if you read through the call show questions, there is some stuff about bullying women that is more what I remember. I can’t find it now, but there was this cartoon in their magazine once, which to me symbolized the teachings. The first panel was a tiny woman and a big, strong man. As the panels (maybe six or eight panels) went along, the woman got bigger and stronger, and the man got smaller, until, at the end it was a huge, ugly woman sitting next to a coffin. Anyway, my mom and dad realized that my mom was the source of all evil in our family, and that if my brother and I were to grow up right, we would have to overcome the feminine influences in our lives.

My mom wasn’t allowed to touch us any more around the time that I turned seven. My brother had been nursing, and my mom cut him off from nursing without any weaning process. If I ran to my parents’ room because I had a nightmare, my mom had to put a pillow between herself and me so that she wouldn’t transmit her evil. I was a daddy’s little girl, so I understood that as long as I stayed that way, didn’t touch my mom, married young (it was understood that this would probably be to the cult leader’s grandson), and devoted my life to my children, I would avoid the pit of feminine evil to which I was otherwise susceptible. Years later, when a friend of mine went home early from a sleepover weekend because, she said, my parents never hugged us, my parents realized that still none of us touched each other ever, but it is difficult to change habits.

I am extra-sensitive to anti-feminist propaganda, I know, because of this upbringing. My mom continued to believe for the rest of her life that it was her job to repress any part of her personality that might conflict with my dad, the head of our household. But, I continued to look to my mom for the relationship I had with her when I was very young. I always hoped she would wake up and come back to me, until I realized a few years before she died, during her eight-year-long dying process, that she never would. I set some boundaries about what I could contribute to our relationship, and because my mom couldn’t contribute anything, we lost the façade that our relationship had been. At that time, a friend reprimanded me, saying that she cherished that special mother-child bond with her own kids, and I would regret not maintaining that before my mom died. I thought a lot about that later, and my inability to maintain that connection with my mom haunted me, even though I can’t say I regretted setting the boundaries I did.

From the time I was little and my mom emotionally vacated the family, I got so used to looking for that relationship from her that I also started looking to everyone for it. I thought it was intimacy. Motherless Daughters talks about how people often call motherless women “adoptable,” and this has been true for me. Many families have adopted me, and I love all of them, but I have always thought that I haven’t been able to re-create that specific form of intimacy because of my own emptiness and awkwardness. I knew I loved these people, but I thought it was not the right kind of connection. And, then, when they had to do normal things for their normal lives, which I completely want them to do, it was a betrayal to me that was its own, plus the loss of my mom. When friends would move away, or start a new relationship and get busy, it was a betrayal with emotional intensity far beyond what I actually expected from the relationship. This was true for both friends and romances, both women and men in my life.

So, I’m not totally sure how this mourning thing works, but Edelman says that for her it is like a companion – not in a morbid sense, but in the sense that she continues to be without her mother. I think it’s reassuring to know that when I feel disproportionately intense about some kind of failure or rejection, it could be part of mourning: I could need to step back and re-adjust myself to the losses I’ve had so they don’t get confused with the relationships I am having. I could need to recognize that not every action a dear friend takes for him or herself is a sign that I am a burden to that person and they secretly wish they could reject me. I’m not sure why, but recognizing this about my relationship with my mom makes it easier to accept that people I really care about could care about me, too, even if they are not devastated when I am gone, and that when life pulls us apart, they could feel the loss of me as I feel the loss of them. Each new love does not have to be the sum of all previous loves and rejections. No new love is what I lost from my mother.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though clearly intended for women who've lost their mothers, this book is full of insights for someone like me, the father of a motherless daughter. It reveals much that I suspected and even more that had not occurred to me about the difficulties and opportunities presented to a daughter with the loss of her mother. Hope Edelman surveyed many women who had lost their mothers and drew some valuable conclusions about the effect of such a loss on both the child and the adult daughter.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clerk at a plant nursery recommended this book to me--I don't recall what I said to prompt her to bring it up, but she insisted I get it immediately, and without sounding too dramatic, this book saved my life.

My mother had died about ten years earlier--I was twenty-two--and I was struggling. I looked and acted like I had it all together, but inside I was falling apart. (Guess the woman saw right through me.)

I am forever grateful to Ms. Edelman and the woman at the nursery because this book helped me to understand the ways that my mother's death was continuing to affect me and offered ideas on how to cope.

I had always felt a bit guilty for struggling with my mother's death--after all, I was an adult when she died. Even others, upon my telling them that my mother had died when I was twenty-two, would say, "Oh, at least you weren't young." Hearing this made me feel weak and childish. I always wanted to scream at them that I never got to know my mother as a woman, and my mother would never get to know me as a peer. It hurts me that people seem to brush off the magnitude of me losing my mom at the age I was ... like I was too old to be affected by it in a profound way.

This year I turn the same age as my mother was when she died, and I'll be reading it again to help me get past this hurdle. I was relieved to read that it is common to assume you won't live past the age your mom was when she died. (Wish me luck! Ha ha.)

I can't recommend this book enough. Pick it up for yourself or for someone you know who has lost their mother. It is straightforward yet gentle and calm. It is miraculous.

[Jorine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been extremely helpful to me. I have lost both of my parents. None of my friends (luckily) knew what I was going through and so it was very hard to talk to people about the loss and about the feelings I had regarding the loss. I felt very lonely. Then I decided to take a leap of faith and fly to the US (I'm from the Netherlands) in order to become more confident and independent. I went to Boston and - being the booknerd that I am - ended up at Borders and I stumbled upon this book. I had never heard of it. I sat down and started to read. I was crying in the bookshop (kind of embarrassing, really). I read the passage about seeing somebody dying. Edelman described the scene so vividly and it reminded me of my mother's death, which was almost exactly the same. It was gripping and heart-wrenching. I wiped my tears, bought the book, took a breath and went to sit nearby the harbour enjoying life. Even though we have experienced traumatizing things, we should not forget to live our life. So there I sat, halfway across the world. My parents would've been proud.

Thanks to this book, I came to terms with my mum's death. It taught me that there are several stages of grief and that you should take the time to go through them. I always thought that what I felt was weird, but the book taught me otherwise. It was like I was talking to a friend who had gone through the same tragedies. I felt relieved because I could relate to other people's stories and mine was similar. Finally, I didn't have to 'explain' myself. Whenever I feel the need, I turn to the book and seek advice, relatable stories, etc. It's all in there. That's what makes "Motherless Daughters" such an amazing book to me.

[Mary · Rating 1 out of 5]

Motherless Daughters has been mentioned to me a few times in the many years since my mother passed away when I was a teenager. I appreciated that the author gathered a multitude of stories. It was very cathartic to read the experiences of other people - especially regarding a topic that can be emotional and is not casually shared. This book gave me insight into some of my own behavior, and I am very thankful for that.
Then I got to the chapter 'When a Woman Needs a Woman: Gender Matters.' Wherein the author kinda flat out says that lesbians (the motherless daughter variety) are in same sex relationships because they are looking for someone to mother them!!! Eeew. Eeew. Eeew. And NO. I immediately flipped to the front of the book to see when this edition was published. 1970? the 80's? nope. 2006! Unbelieveable that it was outdated even when it was printed! For a book that is so widely read and recommended for people who are grieving, I didn't expect pages smeared with homophobia. I was grossed out and couldn't finish the book. It lost all credibility for me.
This book desperately needs to be updated.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't help but think of Motherless Daughters yesterday, Feb.17, 2011, as that day was the 24th anniversary of the day my mother died. I was 21, and my world caved in with her death. I read this book 7 or 8 years after her death and it tossed me a lifeline. The words of Motherless Daughters explained why I was feeling/behaving the way I was, and that I was not alone. This book gave me a sense of peace and healing that has stayed with me for many, many years.

This book is based on the interviews of many women who lost their mother's at an early age. It shows the common threads that we, as motherless daughters, share. We are members of a club we joined before we were ready.

This is an emotionally difficult book to read. But, if you have lost your mother(especially if you were young), then get yourself an economy-sized box of Kleenex and dig in. You will be glad you did.

[Lisa Vegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book immediately when it was published in hardcover. And it was so special because many of the experiences and feelings written here resonated so strongly with me, and sometimes I was hearing them for the first time from someone other than myself, even though I’d had a friend and some acquaintances who’d experienced loss of a mother during childhood or adolescence. (Led me to join a motherless daughters support group, and some members of our group continued meeting on our own for years, which was a good experience.) This was the first book I read that really addressed the ramifications of losing a mother at a young age by someone who had the experience. It made me feel less alone, and it was an interesting read as well.

My copy is: First Printing April 1994.

[Wendy Armstrong · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a patchy collection of anecdotes and snippets of psychology. It's definitely aimed at women whose mothers died when they (the daughters) were under 25, and isn't really suitable for later, 'normal' mother loss. I am in the target demographic (mother died in her 30s when I was 18) but I don't think I'll ever refer to this book again.

The two overarching messages I took from Edelman, and which pervade the book, were:

1. We idealise our dead mothers, honouring them ‘by granting them posthumous perfection’. The book continually returns to the theme of exalting the 'flawless' dead mother. I could not relate to this. It’s all a bit sanitised and sentimental for me, even though it tries not to be. Alternatively (or is it at the same time - not clear) we might feel anger and rage…… but that’s as much as she says about that really. She doesn’t explore anger in much depth, or how to deal with it. She touches briefly on things like feeling 'venom' at the sight of mothers/daughters/grandmothers interacting, which is interesting, but doesn’t really develop this.

2. Although pregnancy and childbirth churn up lots of psychological trauma around the absent mother, she agrees that most people ‘find renewal and the healing of childhood pain in the experience of bringing a child into the world’. She concludes that motherless daughters say they ‘feel whole again’ when they have a child of their own. This seems quite simplistic, and she has very little to say to those who don’t or can’t have children. In examining her own healing process, she lists becoming a mother before all else; this is absolutely valid, but I get the impression from the final chapters that she can’t really relate to any other perspective but her own. As someone without kids, I took no comfort from and saw no usefulness in the overriding message she promotes.

I really enjoyed the first four chapters and recognised many scenarios that she describes (she’s very strong on fear of dying at the same age your mother died, and hypochondria from watching someone die, and the horror of the experience especially when it’s mismanaged or when care is entrusted to a teenager). She's good on how communication is paramount, and the fallout when surviving family don't talk about the dead mother. Her insights on how it feels to not have a mother in your teens and 20s are excellent. I faltered a bit when I got to the chapter nauseatingly entitled ‘Daddy’s Little Girl’, because I couldn’t really relate to the types of father described – I don’t think she acknowledged how angry, unhinged and self-obsessed they can be - and she doesn’t go into the estrangement that can occur after death of the mother. The siblings chapter isn't very strong either.

It’s a bit uneven and is basically a patched together collection of anecdotes and bits of pop psychology, some very relatable and others not so much - maybe necessarily so, so there’s something for everyone. I will not be ‘keeping it by my bed’ to dip into. It’s an interesting read but you might not recognise or agree with a lot of the scenarios described. Despite the fact that the author clearly takes obvious pains to include examples of (in her opinion) culturally diverse women - in the end, if you are not just like Edelman, you might not find much comfort in it.
I bought the book to try to deal with things that are resurfacing from that time, and feelings that may be age- and circumstance-related, but it didn't help.

[Jaralee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book for my neighbors ages 18 and 21 who just lost their mother to breast cancer in June. Before giving it to them, I decided to order a copy for myself so I could read it and decide if they might be ready to hear the message the author was sharing given they are newly grieving. What I found is that this book resonated with me so much as I dealt with my own mother loss. My mom developed early onset Alzheimer's when I was in my mid 20s. She died when I was 40 almost ten years ago. This book is a compilation of stories and research of over 150 women who lost their mothers at a young age - since I was 40 when my mom died, I didn't think of myself in this category, but because I "lost" my mom in my 20's due to her unique illness, I related to so much of what other women have dealt with having lost their moms before the natural order of expectation. The book did not have any magical answers - the author even opened with the depressing idea that "time does not heal everything" - the one idea we all want to hold on to. We all hope and think "Someday, it won't be so hard to cope with the idea that my mom is gone" This is absolutely true for me. But the author also noted what I have found true in my own life. That although time doesn't make the pain go away, it does allow us the ability to develop better coping strategies, and gain support from others that makes the pain easier to bear. It was comforting to read about other women's experiences as they reflected back to losing their mom at an impressionable age. It gave voice to my own story, and helped me understand where I come from regarding this situation. I have decided to wait to give this book to my dear young neighbors after they have had a chance to move in and out of their own grief - probably next year sometime. I am grateful that I read this book and recommend it to anyone who has lost their mother at an age when the loss affected them more than they thought possible.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

22 – As soon as I get angry I want to defend her
108 – Negative Projection: if someone’s late, they’re dead. Fear of similar losses may become a defining characteristic of her personality. What tremendous luck is going to prevent all the people I love from dying?
111 – People pleaser because I don’t want to risk anyone’s rejection
182-187 – The anxious-ambivalent daughter in relationships: when a woman looks to a partner to mother her, she sees the relationship through the eyes of a child. She instantaneously regresses, expecting to get what she wants, when she wants it, and she’ll stamp her feet and cry or silently sulk when she doesn’t win. And what she wants is constant affection and praise. She believes, like a child, that she can control others. She needs to learn that her anxieties have little to do with her husband’s behaviors.
184 – Frequently denies or ignores the warning signs of a troubled relationship, insisting that she is special and worthwhile enough to prevent a loved one from leaving

[Jerjonji · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Anne Quindlen quote early in the book says it all... "For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vestpocket description of my emotional complexion:'Meet you in the lobby iin ten minutes- I have long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was nineteen.'" Except for me, it reads, 'and my mother died when I was fourteen.'

This is THE book- the book that "gets" me, that understands where I'm coming from and why. This is the book I never knew existed, about feelings I thought were so unique that no one else in the entire world understood them- except for another motherless daughter.

This is THE book I'll give to every motherless daughter I meet. I suspect she'll find herself inside too.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books is written primarily about women who have lost their mothers earlier in life and the life long impact this has, yet I still find it an important book for every woman. We all are daughters, many are mothers, and we all know mothers and daughters who have been impacted or will some day be impacted by the loss of a mother. The void created by mother loss is universal. This important book can help each of us understand our "sisters" better and help us deal with our own mother loss whether that be in the past or future.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Find yourself in this book - an affirmation of loss.
July 8, 2000

I don't know if Hope Edleman could ever really fathom the good she has done through writing this book, and how she has brought such beautiful purpose and meaning to her profound loss. What an amazing tribute to her mom. ---------- I was 11 years old when my mother, Linda, died suddenly from a brain aneurism. She was only 45 years old. Not a day in my life has passed that I don't miss her immensely. At the age of 18, a week before my high school graduation, I found myself grieving for my mom more than ever. I was watching morning tv as I was preparing for school and saw Ms. Edleman discussing this book and I knew that I was meant to read it.

I can hardly put into words just how powerful Motherless Daughters has been in my own efforts to cope with life after losing the most important woman in it. Motherless Daughters is the closest written expression you will find of understanding the depth and breadth of the loss of a mother. I was amazed to read about the experiences of others with similar and even unsimilar circumstances and discover how much I shared with them in their feelings of loss. Feelings you may not have even experienced consciously are brought to light and put into words when you never knew it could be. You will find yourself in this book time and time again.

Motherless Daughters has an extraordinary way of affirming the reader and bringing comfort to the child that continues to grieve within, no matter how many years you have lived without her. The daughter learns that contrary to societal's response to the death of her mom, that it is so natural for her to continue grieving for her. This realization meant so much to me as I still deal with the impact of my mom's death. I am 23 and 12 years have passed since, yet I still often find the emptiness of losing her overwhelming.

My book is now tattered and worn from all the marking of pages and underlining and loaning out to people I knew could benefit from reading it. So many of my friends that have lost their moms have bought their own. Just reading it was not enough. I completely understand. I have read and reread my own copy several times and each time, it has new meaning to me.

I don't necessarily recommend giving this book to someone who has just recently lost their mom, however. Its purpose really serves best after some time has passed. Not to mention, I think to give this book to a daughter some months or even years after the loss helps her to remember that you empathize with the loss she still feels though it may go unspoken, and most importantly, you have not forgotten her mother's life. That's the best gift of all.

[Tory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm giving this book 5 stars but it really transcends any rating system I could assign to it because this book changed my life. On almost every page of this book there was a sentence that resonated with me so deeply that my body would physically react to it. Most of this book I read through tears and pounding heart beats. I don't know exactly why I chose to read this book now, almost 8 years after my mom's death, but my therapist likes to say that things have a way of coming to us when we need them, and that trauma resurfaces when the body is ready to deal with it. I fully believe that I would not have been ready to read this book any sooner than I did. For a lot of my life I have felt very alone in my grief, and this book helped me recognize the reasons why I felt like that and that many other women over the years have gone through a similar, isolating experience. I can't begin to explain how relieving it is to know that other women have felt exactly as I have, almost down to the exact words I would use. I think often about how my mothers death affected me but I feel like I am just coming to terms with the work that I still have to do to complete my cycle of grief. As she says in the epilogue of this book: "[Motherless Daughters] have learned, if nothing else, how to take responsibility for ourselves." I know that this is true. "The next, even more important step is to move into the place where we can take consistently good emotional care of ourselves—not by excluding others from our lives but by learning how to trust, respect, and value the children we were and the women we are." I am working towards this step and I imagine I will be for the rest of my life. But I am getting better, and this book helped immensely, if only to know that it is possible to move forward without being alone. I look for my mom all the time, everywhere. As I get older I find her more and more within myself. My face in the mirror, the pitch of my voice, my weakness for silly romance books, my willingness to see small beauty and adventure. I invent a past and a present and a future where she is there, because she is, because I carry her forward with me, for the rest of my life. She is in the air I breathe, in the steps I take, and one day hopefully in the faces and voices and reading habits of my children. It is life changing to know that the grief I have felt over these 8 years is normal, and that other women walk around with the same sense of alienation. This book made me realize how pervasive her death is in everything I struggle with; my anxiety, my struggle to feel like a "real" woman, etc. This review is incoherent but this book is astounding and should be read by every motherless daughter when they are ready to read it.

[Maura · Rating 5 out of 5]

When a girl or woman you know experiences the death of her mother, instead of sending flowers, get her this book. In fact, give this to the husband of a woman who died and left a young daughter; I know of several men who read this in an effort to understand what their daughter would go through without a mother. Alternately heartbreaking and heartwarming, if you've lost your Mom, whatever age you were when it happened, you will turn to this book over and over again for comfort and hope. I can't recommend this book highly enough, and I'm always surprised that more people, including therapists, don't know of it and recommend it too. I'd give it 10 stars if I could.

[Amanda Grice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me realize the feelings I have had my entire life were normal. I lost my mom at the age of five. This year I celebrated outliving her. It is a weird journey. Ultimately though I’m not alone.

[Sara Stouffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

My mom died about 5 months ago. I am 27 years old. She had been sick for a few years with cancer and I took the book out from the library while she was in the hospital during the last month of her life because I hoped that I would find something helpful in it, that it would make me feel less scared, and less alone.
It did help. At least it helped as much as any book could. Of course the book isn't perfect, nothing could be a perfect help or a perfect fix for a daughter losing her mother before she would have imagined. This book was helpful to me, in some way. I think it would have been even more helpful if I had been younger when I experienced losing my mom (but of course, I'm pleased that was not the case). The book is definitely geared towards daughters who lose their mothers during their formative and teen years. For those girls, I am especially thankful this book exists. I can't imagine what it must be like to lose a parent that young.
This book did a few things for me. It made me thankful for the time I had with my mom. I can spend my life wishing she were still here, and some days I do spend thinking just that. Or I can chose to be happy for the time she was here. I am lucky I had my mom for 27 years. Some people are less lucky. I am lucky I had a great relationship with my mom. Some people aren't that lucky. I am lucky my grief is not more complicated than it needs to be. This book also made sense of some of the things that I was feeling. There were times when tears would be rolling down my cheeks because I felt less alone. There were other people out there who felt the things I was feeling. I was still normal.
I would recommend this book for any daughter who has lost a mother. It might not all apply to you, but at the least, some smaller part will, and that part will be a comfort.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not one to quote or recommend a "self help" book, as if it often categorized. I bought this book the month it came out over ten years ago, when I was working in a bookstore. I couldn’t wait to read it and then I couldn’t put it down. Overall, I think its popularity with women who have lost a mother at a young age, because Edelman confirms all the emotions you go through, and through again as you, as a woman, and a mother. She was the first person I heard state she didn’t believe in the "traditional" grief process. I thought I was crazy and it was just me. Milestones in any person’s life differ vastly when a parent, particularly a parent of the same sex, is deceased, compared to those who have both or at least one parent to share the joy with. And that old grief cycle starts again, to its extent, and then ends and waits until the next milestone in my life. I don’t think it’s a book for someone who has recently lost a mother. I know she wouldn’t "get it" or appreciate the overall message until she’s had to walk a mile in her mother’s heels.
It is one of my most cherished books and its as if my mother gave it to me, and I will and have never lent it to anyone.

[kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you, fellow Motherless Daughters, for verbalizing all the tears I’ve shed and helping me better understand them.

[michelle king · Rating 5 out of 5]

i took my time with this one. 2 months to finish. i started reading it a month after my mom died. it’s a dense text, backed with personal accounts from over 99 women who lost mothers at a young age. heavily researched, full of eye-opening statistics and historical context. i felt less alone while reading this, and continue to feel less alone after reading it.

“When I was a senior in college, my boyfriend clipped an Anna Quindlen column from the Chicago Tribune for me. ‘My mother died when I was nineteen,’ Quindlen wrote. ‘For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vest-pocket description of my emotional complexion: ‘Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes— I have long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was nineteen.’”

probably the most important, necessary read for me.
in my lifetime.

[Madison Kemerling · Rating 5 out of 5]

A week after my mom passed, a friend handed me this book and said “I wish I could change the title”, for obvious reasons it isn’t the most gentle. And although it’s been a little over a year since then, I needed all of my sweet time taking in every line of this book. No words to quite describe all it’s been for me, all it’s comforted me in, and strengthened in me— but I needed it, harsh title and all

[Amber Nikirk · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s a difficult read and I stopped at 58% because I wanted to be done with it. Too many stories from her counseling sessions with people and not enough practical help and information. It’s a very emotions based book. But helpful in recognizing why we are the way we are if you’ve had difficulties in your childhood with the relationship with your mother and have NEVER self reflected or evaluated that part of your life. I was hoping for it to be more practical and less emotionally based. Not written from a biblical perspective so there’s no reference to finding hope in God to ultimately heal the wounds. It just kind of leaves the reader in their sadness—this happened and this is why you’re like this…bummer. But there is hope in God! So sad that many do not find that hope for future wholeness. Overall, I would not recommend this book as a read alone. But perhaps to pull information from and go through with a friend or someone who is starting the growth process.

[Kari · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was given this book at the age of 15 right after my mother died. My cousin's wife, who also lost her mother at a young age, had read it and found it incredibly helpful.

It took me three years to read past the first page, mostly because it just made the fact that my mom was never coming back so much more real. But once I was strong enough to read it, I found so much comfort in its pages. It seemed that every. single. woman. who wrote to Hope, wrote exactly what I had felt, and still did feel. It was amazing to know that I wasn't the only girl in the world who thought that her heart would stop the moment her mother's heart stopped. To know that all of pain and fear I felt was normal.

My husband (then my boyfriend) also read this book to better understand some of my irrational fears and relationship anxiety.

[hanita · Rating 1 out of 5]

def was written for cishet white women but the dead mother to avoidant attachment style pipeline is so real also way too Freudian for me to take seriously and shoutout to the 2 pages abt lesbianism! The migrant latine mother death experience does not resonate with the majority of this book bc what do u mean the mother’s role is to be the barrier between daughter and father and a sexual object of the house hold….. my mami was a badass who taught herself english while working poverty wage jobs stfuuuuu would benefit from some class analysis and dialectics

[Jessica J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

They should hand this book out with your ovaries. That sounds glib, but seriously: nearly every single woman out there is going to lose her mother one day. When you do, this book will be your lifeline. It is essential reading -- I revisit it every year on the anniversary of my own mother's death.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me thirty years to read this book. My aunt gave it to me when it was first published in 1994, which was just three years after my mother committed suicide, but I just did not want to read it; I was almost repelled by it, frankly. When I learned that my mom had died I had no reaction other than a vague sense of relief that her pain and my family’s pain was finally over. She struggled with schizophrenia, and no interventions, pharmacological or otherwise, ever worked. Her moments of lucidity became fewer as she got older, and I eventually gave up all hope. Reading this book would have taken me back to those dark places, and, quite honestly, I haven’t been in a place in my life where it felt safe to do that until now, at forty-five years old.

I decided to read this book now because I have myriad tools in my toolkit to help me ease my nervous system when I have a trauma response. I’m also reading it now because a dear friend and spiritual teacher of mine has been working with me to help me go deeper and address some new challenges that have emerged, and my work with her has shown me that the darkest place, the place I’ve most been avoiding, is the year I spent in foster care at three years old and did not think I would ever get to be with my mother again. While I rarely talk about that experience even in a therapeutic setting, one thing I do occasionally share is that being in foster care was the worst experience of my life. And that’s saying something because I experienced significant abuse as a child, in addition to trying to cope with my mother’s illness. What I realized is that a part of me is still very much stuck in the past and, while I’ve worked through the trauma of abuse (with beautiful results that include forgiveness, reconciliation, and true transformation), I’ve not been willing to deal with the Mount Everest sized pain of fearing I would lose my best friend, then knowing I would lose my best friend, and finally losing my best friend. So, I started doing some searching on Google for books about losing one’s mother and, of course, this book continued to come up, so I finally capitulated.

I did not read the first edition that was published in 1994 but instead read the second edition, which was published in 2014. Nevertheless, as of my writing this review, it is ten years old and that’s significant. While I think it is a worthy read to help motherless daughters not feel so alone, it is lacking in research and context, in part because so much has been written since about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and trauma (keep in mind, as well, that Edelmen is a writer not a mental health professional or physician). For example, Bessel van der Kolk’s, The Body Keeps the Score, a life changing book for me and many others (it continues to top the charts of best selling nonfiction books), was published the same year that the second edition of this book came out. Also problematic are the assumptions about causation in this book. Chances are that, in particular, those daughters who lost mothers to drug and/or alcohol abuse, violence, or suicide also experienced other ACEs, like I did. Our experiences are so much more complicated than the one data point of being motherless daughters. I found I could barely focus when reading this book because I kept wondering if what I was reading really described me or my experience. In some cases it did, and in others it did not, but even when it did I wasn’t always convinced that the origin was in my having lost my mother. The other significant issue with this book is that, other than a tacit recommendation to get therapy, very little guidance is offered on how to approach healing: What kind of therapy? What kind of therapist? Reading a book and knowing you are not alone is step one, but there is likely a long way to go after that.

Some things that did resonate with me: Navigating gender and femininity is often challenging for motherless daughters; motherless daughters are frequently high achievers; and creativity is often an outlet for motherless daughters. I was also struck by one of the questions on the survey Edlemen administered, which essentially asked respondents if anything positive had come from their mother’s death. It’s taken many years, but I can see very clearly now that it expanded my heart and made me far more compassionate. I think it also helped shape my values and clarified what actually matters in this life and what does not (spoiler alert: it’s not what I’ve accomplished educationally, professionally, or athletically). 3 stars.

[Angelina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought it fitting to finally read this book all the way through as 2025 marks 30 years since my mom died.

This book was gifted to me years ago by someone who wrote in the inscription that they felt they “failed me,” and that my mom is “disappointed” in them for not being there for me more.

And you know what. They’re right. Even after they gave me this book they didn’t change their ways. But that’s okay, because I still turned out okay. I still was able to work through losing my mom, and not having a strong female role model in my life for years. I was able to grow up to be strong, resilient, kind, and a good mom.

This book gave me a newfound gratitude for my dad, my (step)mom, and my siblings. The family I have are some of the most amazing people, and even though there were people who tried to destroy that, we won. We did this, we allowed love to overcome all hate.

My dad is such an amazing man who would do anything for his children, who loved and still loves children that weren’t his by blood but by marriage, who is the best grandfather to Addy. My (step)mom, who stood by us through all of the discourse and hate from my “grandmother and grandfather,” and allowed her love for us to conquer anything that tried to destroy us. She has always been the maternal figure I had hoped and prayed for after my mom died, even if I was too hard headed as a teenager to appreciate it.

And my siblings. It’s been thirty years but we are still here for each other. We can still count on each other, and WE DID THAT. No one else. Even though we were all at such different ages when our mom passed, we let the love we have for each other grow and grow.

This book also validated me in how absolutely awful my mother’s mom was. A person so filled with hatred and bitterness that she did everything in her power to try to ruin my life. If I was happy, she was angry. And honestly, I feel sorry for her. She knew she had failed as a mother and grandmother, and instead of looking at the reasons why she felt that way, she took it out on an innocent child who had just lost her mom, and needed a maternal figure to love her, and guide her.

And even after all of that. I don’t hate her. Hate would mean I would have to give energy to her. Instead, it is easier for me to move, and allow her to be the villain of my past, but not my present or future.

I am so thankful for the life I have, for the amazing husband and wonderful daughter we have. I know my mom would be proud of how far I have come, how far all four of her children have come. I know I am proud of us.

[Ghazalehsadr · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is only for girls who have lost their mothers during childhood or early adolescence and nobody else. It’s not for boys, it’s not for female adults who lost mothers, it’s not for children losing fathers. So the target audience is very narrow and did not include me.

The problems were that the book is way too long with too many anecdotes; the writer’s research was conducted on only 100 women which is really not enough for reaching conclusions and writing a book; and her opinions are quite outdated when she talks about gender roles or sex. She assumes all household chores are for the mother or that homosexual women who are motherless become lesbian because they are seeking a mother figure to take care of them!! (No, this book was not published in the 70s or 80s!!!)

So while the book had its good moments during the early chapters, it started to go downhill afterwards. Hope Edelman’s most recent book, The Aftergrief, is much better and that one is a read I suggest, but not this one, unless you are a woman and you lost your mother at an early age.

[Jessi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book spoke to me in so many ways. It may have taken me a long time to read this book, but a lot of that time was well spent. I wrote down a lot of quotes and notes from this book that resonated with me in one way or another. Many of the things that I have experienced and felt throughout my life has been validated within the pages of this book- both through the author’s experiences and through the experiences of the women the author interviewed for this book.

[Rachel Trepagnier · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is primarily written for women who have lost mother’s in childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood. I’m not sure when the perfect time to read this book would be for other daughters who have lost their mothers, but I am glad that I picked it up all these years later when I am increasingly recognizing patterns and behaviors that have been shaped by her loss. This book was very validating. It gave me a lot of comfort and clarify.