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Bad Bad Girl
The award-winning author of The Resisters returns with an engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.
My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .
Gish’s mother—Loo Shu-hsin—is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally minded education. Still, her father would say, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D. in America. It is 1947, and with the forces of Communist revolution on the horizon, she leaves—never to return.
Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents’ marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!”
Bad Bad Girl is a novel about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with each other across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spanning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in a complicated lifelong embrace.
My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .
Gish’s mother—Loo Shu-hsin—is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally minded education. Still, her father would say, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D. in America. It is 1947, and with the forces of Communist revolution on the horizon, she leaves—never to return.
Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents’ marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!”
Bad Bad Girl is a novel about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with each other across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spanning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in a complicated lifelong embrace.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published October 21, 2025
270 people are currently reading
9749 people want to read
About the author
Gish Jen
40 books430 followersGish Jen grew up in New York, where she spoke more Yiddish than Chinese. She has been featured in a PBS American Masters program on the American novel. Her distinctions also include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute fellowship. She was awarded a Lannan Literary Prize in 1999 and received a Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, she has published in the New Yorker and other magazines.
John Updike selected a story of Jen's for The Best American Short Stories of The Century. Her newest book, Tiger Writing, is based on the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, which she delivered at Harvard University in 2012.
John Updike selected a story of Jen's for The Best American Short Stories of The Century. Her newest book, Tiger Writing, is based on the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, which she delivered at Harvard University in 2012.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 145 reviews
September 28, 2025
This is a hard book to read but also one I found cathartic given my own difficult relationship with my mother. Jen is honest about her own ambivalences: 'Is this why I am writing this, so I can remember my mother fondly? Is that the same as forgiving her? Or is it more like forgetting her? Am I inventing as much as remembering her? Erasing as much as preserving her?' And it's this self-conscious self-interrogation which makes this book feel so vulnerable and worthwhile.
Written with something like two voices, this recounts the story of Jen's mother and grandmother in Shanghai before, during and after the Revolution, while also interspersing this 'objective' story with an ongoing imagined conversation with her now-dead mother: 'You didn't listen, that's why, she says now. By "listen" you mean "obey", I say. You mean I didn't obey. You were the most disobedient child there ever was. The most difficult to control, you mean.'
What becomes clear - or, at least, this is the narrative Jen puts forward - is that there is a history of trauma which passes through the generations of women: Jen's mother is caught between the expectations of Chinese and American culture and never finishes her PhD because of her serial pregnancies; her own anger is taken out on Jen with beatings, shouting and episodes of strategic silence in the home. It's hard not to see Jen's mother's own frustrations being enacted on a daughter who refuses to bow to her will.
Through it all, Jen takes this doubled perspective of understanding her mother, loving her, wanting to be accepted by her, and resenting intensely both the beatings and the withholding of love, as she sees her siblings favoured. Not even Jen's intense love for her father compensates for this.
It's a testament to Jen's sensitivity that this book feels like a genuine attempt to understand, to try to forgive, a central relationship that is so hurtful, so dysfunctional and so central to her own identity as a woman. As an attempt to break a cycle, this left me both feeling intensely for Jen and hugely admiring of the way she has managed to detach herself enough to write this without falling into a 'misery porn' place.
Many thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley
Written with something like two voices, this recounts the story of Jen's mother and grandmother in Shanghai before, during and after the Revolution, while also interspersing this 'objective' story with an ongoing imagined conversation with her now-dead mother: 'You didn't listen, that's why, she says now. By "listen" you mean "obey", I say. You mean I didn't obey. You were the most disobedient child there ever was. The most difficult to control, you mean.'
What becomes clear - or, at least, this is the narrative Jen puts forward - is that there is a history of trauma which passes through the generations of women: Jen's mother is caught between the expectations of Chinese and American culture and never finishes her PhD because of her serial pregnancies; her own anger is taken out on Jen with beatings, shouting and episodes of strategic silence in the home. It's hard not to see Jen's mother's own frustrations being enacted on a daughter who refuses to bow to her will.
Through it all, Jen takes this doubled perspective of understanding her mother, loving her, wanting to be accepted by her, and resenting intensely both the beatings and the withholding of love, as she sees her siblings favoured. Not even Jen's intense love for her father compensates for this.
It's a testament to Jen's sensitivity that this book feels like a genuine attempt to understand, to try to forgive, a central relationship that is so hurtful, so dysfunctional and so central to her own identity as a woman. As an attempt to break a cycle, this left me both feeling intensely for Jen and hugely admiring of the way she has managed to detach herself enough to write this without falling into a 'misery porn' place.
Many thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley
December 17, 2025
4.5 stars. A hybrid memoir/novel, in which Gish Jen sustains a book-length imaginary conversation with her now-deceased Chinese immigrant mother, who was cruelly abusive and emotionally absent.
Now 70 and the mother of two adult children of her own, Gish is the titular "bad bad girl," a magnet for her mother's disappointment and disapproval, despite her eventual literary success. But this isn't a pity party or trauma porn-- this book is suffused with warmth and joy, and a sympathetic account of the first- and second-generation Chinese-American immigrant experience. It's also filled with classical Chinese poetry and beautiful, heartbreaking prose.
In the book's first half, Jen approaches her mother's historical and personal trauma with radical empathy. She creates a detailed and immersive reconstruction of Agnes Loo's youth and early adulthood as the privileged daughter of a wealthy Shanghai banker, pampered by servants in a mansion and attending English-speaking Catholic girl's school.
Departing China for New York as a graduate student in 1947, Agnes never sees her family again, and is half a world away while the Communist regime strips away their assets and targets them for political persecution as capitalist counter-revolutionaries. In Manhattan Agnes becomes broke after her family's finances crash, meets and marries Gish's father Norman Jen, a Chinese engineering graduate (and Shanghainese speaker) who also recently emigrated to the United States. Pregnancy forces Agnes to abandon her PhD program, and she becomes an embittered suburban housewife who projects her repressed anger upon her five high-achieving children.
In the second half of Bad Bad Girl, Jen reconstructs the story of her own childhood, and her fraught relationship with Agnes as an adult. While her parents' families were targeted by the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Jen and her siblings grew up in affluent Westchester, English-speakers separated from their parents' culture and history by the gulf of everything they had left unsaid.
Truly loving her mother requires Jen to understand Agnes as a full but flawed human being, and to comprehend the personal traumas and untreated disorders that warped and degraded her ability to love her children. Along the way, Jen makes active decisions on how to stop the cycle, and to become a very different kind of parent to her own children and a loving caretaker for her declining parents.
This was a wonderfully rich and satisfying reading experience. Highly recommended.
Thanks to Knopf and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
Now 70 and the mother of two adult children of her own, Gish is the titular "bad bad girl," a magnet for her mother's disappointment and disapproval, despite her eventual literary success. But this isn't a pity party or trauma porn-- this book is suffused with warmth and joy, and a sympathetic account of the first- and second-generation Chinese-American immigrant experience. It's also filled with classical Chinese poetry and beautiful, heartbreaking prose.
In the book's first half, Jen approaches her mother's historical and personal trauma with radical empathy. She creates a detailed and immersive reconstruction of Agnes Loo's youth and early adulthood as the privileged daughter of a wealthy Shanghai banker, pampered by servants in a mansion and attending English-speaking Catholic girl's school.
Departing China for New York as a graduate student in 1947, Agnes never sees her family again, and is half a world away while the Communist regime strips away their assets and targets them for political persecution as capitalist counter-revolutionaries. In Manhattan Agnes becomes broke after her family's finances crash, meets and marries Gish's father Norman Jen, a Chinese engineering graduate (and Shanghainese speaker) who also recently emigrated to the United States. Pregnancy forces Agnes to abandon her PhD program, and she becomes an embittered suburban housewife who projects her repressed anger upon her five high-achieving children.
In the second half of Bad Bad Girl, Jen reconstructs the story of her own childhood, and her fraught relationship with Agnes as an adult. While her parents' families were targeted by the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Jen and her siblings grew up in affluent Westchester, English-speakers separated from their parents' culture and history by the gulf of everything they had left unsaid.
Truly loving her mother requires Jen to understand Agnes as a full but flawed human being, and to comprehend the personal traumas and untreated disorders that warped and degraded her ability to love her children. Along the way, Jen makes active decisions on how to stop the cycle, and to become a very different kind of parent to her own children and a loving caretaker for her declining parents.
This was a wonderfully rich and satisfying reading experience. Highly recommended.
Thanks to Knopf and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
November 28, 2025
Bad Bad Girl is Gish Jen's long overdue letter to her mother, written as a novel because real life refused to cooperate. It begins with the mother already dead, which does not prevent her from interrupting the narration. She heckles her daughter from the afterlife, as all great mothers do, correcting facts, syntax, and moral perspective.
The daughter, who stands in for the author, tries to reconstruct her mother's life from scraps: a few notebooks, memories, and that most unreliable of archives, guilt. What she finds is a story that stretches from the silk-and-opium Shanghai of the 1920s to the suburban purgatories of mid-century America, linked by the thread of one woman's ironclad refusal to explain herself.
The mother begins as a Suzhou beauty's daughter, raised by servants and scolded by fate. She learns early that in China, girls are decorative until they're inconvenient, and that the proper response to love is silence and submission. Her closest bond is with a nursemaid who vanishes after too much affection, teaching her that intimacy is punished more severely than theft. This will serve her well.
As the family rises in Shanghai society, the world collapses. Japanese bombs arrive, Communist slogans follow, and emigration becomes a form of witness protection. The mother reinvents herself in America as a Catholic, a wife, and a lifelong practitioner of emotional austerity. Her daughter grows up between piano lessons and cultural confusion, forever failing the impossible filial piety exams.
Across continents and generations, the mother keeps her power by withholding it. Her life becomes a footnote written in invisible ink, and her daughter, exasperated, supplies the text. The mother keeps saying "Bad bad girl," which may mean "You have betrayed me," or "You have finally understood me." The novel itself is the bad act: a daughter's revenge disguised as love, or love disguised as revenge, depending on the page.
Gish Jen wrote a story that feels both intimate and theatrical, like a family argument that grew into literature. The book studies how speech becomes inheritance, and how silence becomes its own language. The humor is sly, the sorrow deliberate, and the writing full of tension between affection and exasperation. An argument that cannot end, which feels entirely appropriate for a story about mothers and daughters.
Identity behaves like a family story retold until it hardens into myth. Each generation revises, edits, and censors the last, and every act of storytelling becomes both tribute and defiance. The themes of migration, gender, and filial duty converge in a beautiful narrative that is just 👌 WOW!
The daughter, who stands in for the author, tries to reconstruct her mother's life from scraps: a few notebooks, memories, and that most unreliable of archives, guilt. What she finds is a story that stretches from the silk-and-opium Shanghai of the 1920s to the suburban purgatories of mid-century America, linked by the thread of one woman's ironclad refusal to explain herself.
The mother begins as a Suzhou beauty's daughter, raised by servants and scolded by fate. She learns early that in China, girls are decorative until they're inconvenient, and that the proper response to love is silence and submission. Her closest bond is with a nursemaid who vanishes after too much affection, teaching her that intimacy is punished more severely than theft. This will serve her well.
As the family rises in Shanghai society, the world collapses. Japanese bombs arrive, Communist slogans follow, and emigration becomes a form of witness protection. The mother reinvents herself in America as a Catholic, a wife, and a lifelong practitioner of emotional austerity. Her daughter grows up between piano lessons and cultural confusion, forever failing the impossible filial piety exams.
Across continents and generations, the mother keeps her power by withholding it. Her life becomes a footnote written in invisible ink, and her daughter, exasperated, supplies the text. The mother keeps saying "Bad bad girl," which may mean "You have betrayed me," or "You have finally understood me." The novel itself is the bad act: a daughter's revenge disguised as love, or love disguised as revenge, depending on the page.
Gish Jen wrote a story that feels both intimate and theatrical, like a family argument that grew into literature. The book studies how speech becomes inheritance, and how silence becomes its own language. The humor is sly, the sorrow deliberate, and the writing full of tension between affection and exasperation. An argument that cannot end, which feels entirely appropriate for a story about mothers and daughters.
Identity behaves like a family story retold until it hardens into myth. Each generation revises, edits, and censors the last, and every act of storytelling becomes both tribute and defiance. The themes of migration, gender, and filial duty converge in a beautiful narrative that is just 👌 WOW!
November 27, 2025
4⭐️ Gish Jen has written an engrossing auto biographical memoir about her relationship with her mother. Don’t we all wish that we’d had more time? Could say things we wanted say but didn’t?
Lillian the oldest daughter of 5 children born to Norman and Agnes Jen ( Chinese immigrants), had a difficult relationship with her mother. Agnes played favorites and Lillian felt unloved much of her life. The story is funny, emotional, and sad at times. Jen brings her parents to life with all their quirks, good and bad.
I enjoyed the telling of her parent’s journey to America and the flashbacks to her mother’s life growing up in China. She touches on the struggles of caring for aging parents and the shutdown the COVID pandemic. Much of the book is conversations with Lilli and her mom that take place posthumously in her mind.
Thank you NetGalley and Knopf publishers for the arc in exchange for my honest review.
Lillian the oldest daughter of 5 children born to Norman and Agnes Jen ( Chinese immigrants), had a difficult relationship with her mother. Agnes played favorites and Lillian felt unloved much of her life. The story is funny, emotional, and sad at times. Jen brings her parents to life with all their quirks, good and bad.
I enjoyed the telling of her parent’s journey to America and the flashbacks to her mother’s life growing up in China. She touches on the struggles of caring for aging parents and the shutdown the COVID pandemic. Much of the book is conversations with Lilli and her mom that take place posthumously in her mind.
Thank you NetGalley and Knopf publishers for the arc in exchange for my honest review.
May 2, 2025
I forgive the expository heavy portions of her mom’s childhood and years of young motherhood because overall Gish Jen gives so much emotional honesty to the reader. I can feel Jen’s efforts at sense-making, her striving to be honest and fair. And throughout scenes of emotional and physical violence she’s able to stay funny and warm.
While reading this I thought a great deal about a conversation I had with a cousin a decade ago. I’d told him that going to therapy, making the decision to take responsibility for my mental health and to deal with my relationship with my mother, was the most grownup thing I had ever done for myself. And he told me I was wise to do so, and it was work I should do while my mom was alive. His own mother had died years prior but he said: her voice is louder now than it was when she was around. Death is not the end of a relationship and I owed it to myself to heal what I could while I could.
While reading this I thought a great deal about a conversation I had with a cousin a decade ago. I’d told him that going to therapy, making the decision to take responsibility for my mental health and to deal with my relationship with my mother, was the most grownup thing I had ever done for myself. And he told me I was wise to do so, and it was work I should do while my mom was alive. His own mother had died years prior but he said: her voice is louder now than it was when she was around. Death is not the end of a relationship and I owed it to myself to heal what I could while I could.
November 15, 2025
With Bad Bad Girl, Gish Jen has written a superb genre-bending book, both moving memoir and fine literary novel. I was bowled over. Highly recommended.
November 30, 2025
Wow…was blown away by this unique, and rather large literary swing. Blurring the lines between memoir, biography, and narrative fiction, the author takes a chance playing with the form, including a running commentary on the storytelling by her deceased mother. I found the results an unmitigated success, and found myself engrossed in the characters, the story, and the author’s perfect balancing act on the tone . . . at times heart breaking, at times humorous, at times confessional.
Loved everything about this book, and it’s going to stay with me for a long time.
Loved everything about this book, and it’s going to stay with me for a long time.
November 27, 2025
Gish Jen is deceptive. This book is deceptive.
It's your secretly rich friend who believes she's been persecuted because she didn't get the right sailboat for Christmas. It's your friend who believes they were the family scapegoat, and can't stop complaining about it 40 years later. This is the exact same stuff you watch in the Mormon Housewives reality TV show. Poor me!
The end attempts some sort of resolution, but it's so shallow that I couldn't care less. Skimmed over the last 20-ish pages, and I wrote my grocery list in the back of this signed first edition instead.
****If you want to just get to the most ridiculous, reality TV situations, skip to the **** section.
This book was a therapeutic exercise for Gish Jen, and should have remained that way--private. Incredibly whiny.
Let's talk about authorial intent. I believe Jen wanted to write about coming to terms with her distant, unempathetic mom. She wanted to write a moving account of difficult relationships, and about generational trauma. A rags-to-riches story of immigrants achieving the American Dream. Trite tropes this story never deviates from.
But, this story got away from her. It's (unconsciously) actually about jealousy. Jen is absolutely, completely, 100% unaware of how privileged her and her family are. They have been so well-resourced for (28) generations, that living like "peasants"--or like the rest of us, is a great familial tragedy.
I have to laugh, going back to the inside cover, indicating that their strained relationship was because the mom was reliving "the harshness of her childhood."
We are supposed to sympathize with her mother, so privileged with her 70 servants that she literally did not carry anything heavier than her purse and had never opened a car door. And she only received a first-rate, modern education, good enough to get her into one of the top US schools! How sad. :( She didn't have to go shoeless though--fortunately she wore the best quality heels, imported from Italy, "the likes of which no one had seen in Shanghai." She can't even imagine how she will deal with picking up her own suitcase in America!
Yeah, they worked hard. But even at one of the lowest points, they have access to resources the rest of us do not. Shu-hsin (mother) being sent to America is like, completely full of privilege. She suffered through being amazing at literally the best educational opportunity available in China, and the poor thing was being sent to get a miserable PhD at one of the top US universities. And the poor thing has a soft landing with a wealthy family who take care of her while she suffers through writing school applications. And they're so mean! Auntie offers to help with the writing and she wrote a big red X on some of the words! She also doesn't let Shu-hsin marry her son, like immediately!
And the author is DECEPTIVE. She keeps up this pretense that they're still financially struggling until nearly the end of the book.
She mentions that her dad, in a struggle to afford tuition, leaves academia to manage an IHOP. It's not until p259 that she discloses he actually BOUGHT the place.
She takes her mom to recover at "a house on a lake" in Vermont--glossing over the part where Jen can afford one or more vacation homes.
After the cultural revolution, the family asks for remittances, and it's completely disguised that the mom has enough funds to start sending money back. We only hear about it from a letter later, suggesting that it's been going on a while.
And Gish is just as selfish as everyone else around. She won't do simple things to help improve family dynamics, because reasons. She's also the only one who has suffered in the family. Even though her brother is beaten viciously--but when she's beaten, it's worse because she's not as emotionally strong. At nearly the end of the book, it's casually mentioned that one of her brothers is gay, and her dad didn't accept it. There's no way that he didn't suffer too.
****************************************
I started to get really angry around the wedding, page 244.
Jen writes that her mom "insisted" on her own venue choice, the Scarsdale Country Club in Westchester. Do you know how much that costs?? But poor Jen thought it was "conventional and boring" which just must have been so painful, to only have your wedding completely paid for (which she doesn't admit, of course).
"Nor did she help pick out my wedding dress" and she sadly bought an OFF THE RACK dress! Two years later her mom spent "thousands of dollars on a custom dress" for her sister.
They DID get to have their favorite foods: beef wellington, chateaubriand, duxelles, you know, the food of the people.
P253: She bought an Italian greyhound and complains, "Some grandchildren got pianos, but not mine!"
P255-6: Her mom starts fighting with the China branch of the family by sending TOO MUCH money.
P257: Her dad gets back at her mom by praising Gish Jen TOO MUCH(?!).
P258: Casual mention that her brother has taken up mountaineering, only the most expensive hobby. Also, her dad gets experimental medical procedures (through connections).
P269: Imagines confronting her mom about parental fighting regarding finances by saying that Jen and her husband David have never fought about money in 40 years! (Because they have 100s of thousands if not millions of dollars.)
P274: Her dad literally dies out of spite.
P293: "It's become one of the principles of my life: just as I do not mother as I was mothered, I try to always give what I can, as much as I can." BS. And she is exactly like her mother--a comparison she makes throughout the book, but perhaps unconsciously. Like I said, she has no idea how privileged she is.
(Also deceptive--there are a lot of advanced reading copy reviews here that are clearly unlabeled. Tons of unlabeled and positive reviews beginning in March. I find it suspect. These kinds of reviews are given too much weight.)
***Recommended for: people who believe the people on Housewives have real problems.
It's your secretly rich friend who believes she's been persecuted because she didn't get the right sailboat for Christmas. It's your friend who believes they were the family scapegoat, and can't stop complaining about it 40 years later. This is the exact same stuff you watch in the Mormon Housewives reality TV show. Poor me!
The end attempts some sort of resolution, but it's so shallow that I couldn't care less. Skimmed over the last 20-ish pages, and I wrote my grocery list in the back of this signed first edition instead.
****If you want to just get to the most ridiculous, reality TV situations, skip to the **** section.
This book was a therapeutic exercise for Gish Jen, and should have remained that way--private. Incredibly whiny.
Let's talk about authorial intent. I believe Jen wanted to write about coming to terms with her distant, unempathetic mom. She wanted to write a moving account of difficult relationships, and about generational trauma. A rags-to-riches story of immigrants achieving the American Dream. Trite tropes this story never deviates from.
But, this story got away from her. It's (unconsciously) actually about jealousy. Jen is absolutely, completely, 100% unaware of how privileged her and her family are. They have been so well-resourced for (28) generations, that living like "peasants"--or like the rest of us, is a great familial tragedy.
I have to laugh, going back to the inside cover, indicating that their strained relationship was because the mom was reliving "the harshness of her childhood."
We are supposed to sympathize with her mother, so privileged with her 70 servants that she literally did not carry anything heavier than her purse and had never opened a car door. And she only received a first-rate, modern education, good enough to get her into one of the top US schools! How sad. :( She didn't have to go shoeless though--fortunately she wore the best quality heels, imported from Italy, "the likes of which no one had seen in Shanghai." She can't even imagine how she will deal with picking up her own suitcase in America!
Yeah, they worked hard. But even at one of the lowest points, they have access to resources the rest of us do not. Shu-hsin (mother) being sent to America is like, completely full of privilege. She suffered through being amazing at literally the best educational opportunity available in China, and the poor thing was being sent to get a miserable PhD at one of the top US universities. And the poor thing has a soft landing with a wealthy family who take care of her while she suffers through writing school applications. And they're so mean! Auntie offers to help with the writing and she wrote a big red X on some of the words! She also doesn't let Shu-hsin marry her son, like immediately!
And the author is DECEPTIVE. She keeps up this pretense that they're still financially struggling until nearly the end of the book.
She mentions that her dad, in a struggle to afford tuition, leaves academia to manage an IHOP. It's not until p259 that she discloses he actually BOUGHT the place.
She takes her mom to recover at "a house on a lake" in Vermont--glossing over the part where Jen can afford one or more vacation homes.
After the cultural revolution, the family asks for remittances, and it's completely disguised that the mom has enough funds to start sending money back. We only hear about it from a letter later, suggesting that it's been going on a while.
And Gish is just as selfish as everyone else around. She won't do simple things to help improve family dynamics, because reasons. She's also the only one who has suffered in the family. Even though her brother is beaten viciously--but when she's beaten, it's worse because she's not as emotionally strong. At nearly the end of the book, it's casually mentioned that one of her brothers is gay, and her dad didn't accept it. There's no way that he didn't suffer too.
****************************************
I started to get really angry around the wedding, page 244.
Jen writes that her mom "insisted" on her own venue choice, the Scarsdale Country Club in Westchester. Do you know how much that costs?? But poor Jen thought it was "conventional and boring" which just must have been so painful, to only have your wedding completely paid for (which she doesn't admit, of course).
"Nor did she help pick out my wedding dress" and she sadly bought an OFF THE RACK dress! Two years later her mom spent "thousands of dollars on a custom dress" for her sister.
They DID get to have their favorite foods: beef wellington, chateaubriand, duxelles, you know, the food of the people.
P253: She bought an Italian greyhound and complains, "Some grandchildren got pianos, but not mine!"
P255-6: Her mom starts fighting with the China branch of the family by sending TOO MUCH money.
P257: Her dad gets back at her mom by praising Gish Jen TOO MUCH(?!).
P258: Casual mention that her brother has taken up mountaineering, only the most expensive hobby. Also, her dad gets experimental medical procedures (through connections).
P269: Imagines confronting her mom about parental fighting regarding finances by saying that Jen and her husband David have never fought about money in 40 years! (Because they have 100s of thousands if not millions of dollars.)
P274: Her dad literally dies out of spite.
P293: "It's become one of the principles of my life: just as I do not mother as I was mothered, I try to always give what I can, as much as I can." BS. And she is exactly like her mother--a comparison she makes throughout the book, but perhaps unconsciously. Like I said, she has no idea how privileged she is.
(Also deceptive--there are a lot of advanced reading copy reviews here that are clearly unlabeled. Tons of unlabeled and positive reviews beginning in March. I find it suspect. These kinds of reviews are given too much weight.)
***Recommended for: people who believe the people on Housewives have real problems.
September 9, 2025
This was engaging and informative but a teensy part of me kept thinking she needs to get over it. I know it's important for mental health for many to examine their difficult relationships with their mothers, but this often felt whiny and repetitive. I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
January 21, 2026
jesus christ. i want to come back and write a real review soon. but god.
March 6, 2025
Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. A lovely autobiographical fiction, where the author recreates her mother’s life, first as she’s born into a wealthy family from Shanghai and then comes to America for college and ends up stranded once China explores into an all consuming Communist Revolution. Her mother marries, has five kids and never goes back to China and never sees her mother again. And that really is the heart of the novel: Mother and daughter relationships that are loving, but also angry and in this case violent and withholding. There’s a wonderful device that snakes through the whole book where as the daughter is writing the book, she is constantly in conversation with her mother, even though her mother has passed away.
October 24, 2025
“The Chinese say, A child should be hollow like bamboo.”
Chinese American author Gish Jen’s sixth novel blends fiction, autofiction, and memoir in her newest book, Bad Bad Girl. After her mother’s death in 2020, Jen decides it’s time to share her mom’s story. She works with a general sketched outline of her mom’s upbringing in a traditional patriarchal Shanghainese family, education at a Catholic school, and emigration to America, and she fills in the colors of her mom’s unknown life with her imagination. As such, she labels Bad Bad Girl a fictionalized account of Agnes Jen, née Loo Shu-Hsin’s (b. 1924), life.
The book is written as though Auntie Agnes, now an elderly woman, communicates the details to her daughter, though. Readers picture Jen notating what her bed-bound yet lucid mother reveals during their time on earth together comes to an end. Jen masterfully brings Auntie Agnes to life, pointing out the jagged parts created early on when her mother (Jen’s grandmother) showed partiality to her second-born son (and subsequent children) and her năi-mā seemingly abandoned her overnight. As Auntie Agnes attends college in America, she receives news about the occupation during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and the revolution of 1949. From America, the land that frees her from her family and provides academic opportunity, she witnesses her family endure reformation as the government confiscates and redistributes property. Meanwhile, she marries Jen’s father (Norman), works to move from ABD to graduation, and undertakes motherhood, including handling Gish, her “bad bad girl.”
Jen’s storytelling about her mom contextualizes their mother-daughter dynamic. Neither a sensationalized nor sparse narrative, we intuit that their precarious relationship only exists into Auntie’s old age because of Jen. The author describes her mother’s emotional, verbal, and physical abuse (i.e., withholding parental love [e.g., encouragement, support, safety]) and disseminating her antagonistic thoughts about Jen’s worth as a person. Multiple times, Jen self-identifies as her sledgehammering mother’s scapegoat, the whipping child to absorb her sadness and trauma. Perhaps Jen reminds Auntie Agnes too much of herself as a kid: she asks questions; she doesn’t know how to talk—a bad daughter. Still, the author tells the story with the emotional restraint that honestly excavates her pain in an ongoing way—“If I write about you, will I understand you better?”—and, quite remarkably, loves her mom.
This judicious love for Auntie Agnes seems radical. It would have been well within Jen’s rights, even as a person who is ethnically Chinese, to set strict boundaries with her mom. Perhaps reflecting the fact that she is the child out of the five whom Auntie Agnes deems the most Chinese, as it were, Jen will negotiate their relationship’s terms until Auntie’s death. Without absolving her mother of the cruelty she inflicts, the author lays out the facts and honors Auntie Agnes’s life.
The beauty in this honor extends beyond their mother-daughter relationship; Jen recognizes her responsibility to love her kids despite not having a role model to imitate closely. Again, this particular relationship does not have to function as a ubiquitous standard for daughter and mothers (or for any relationship marred by trauma). However, she offers grace, and this is all the more moving because of Jen’s age and the wisdom her life brings. As her adult daughter consoles, Jen did a good job of washing trauma’s effects in how she mothered; it already grows fainter.
I rate Bad Bad Girl 4.5 stars.
My thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for an ARC.
Chinese American author Gish Jen’s sixth novel blends fiction, autofiction, and memoir in her newest book, Bad Bad Girl. After her mother’s death in 2020, Jen decides it’s time to share her mom’s story. She works with a general sketched outline of her mom’s upbringing in a traditional patriarchal Shanghainese family, education at a Catholic school, and emigration to America, and she fills in the colors of her mom’s unknown life with her imagination. As such, she labels Bad Bad Girl a fictionalized account of Agnes Jen, née Loo Shu-Hsin’s (b. 1924), life.
The book is written as though Auntie Agnes, now an elderly woman, communicates the details to her daughter, though. Readers picture Jen notating what her bed-bound yet lucid mother reveals during their time on earth together comes to an end. Jen masterfully brings Auntie Agnes to life, pointing out the jagged parts created early on when her mother (Jen’s grandmother) showed partiality to her second-born son (and subsequent children) and her năi-mā seemingly abandoned her overnight. As Auntie Agnes attends college in America, she receives news about the occupation during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and the revolution of 1949. From America, the land that frees her from her family and provides academic opportunity, she witnesses her family endure reformation as the government confiscates and redistributes property. Meanwhile, she marries Jen’s father (Norman), works to move from ABD to graduation, and undertakes motherhood, including handling Gish, her “bad bad girl.”
Jen’s storytelling about her mom contextualizes their mother-daughter dynamic. Neither a sensationalized nor sparse narrative, we intuit that their precarious relationship only exists into Auntie’s old age because of Jen. The author describes her mother’s emotional, verbal, and physical abuse (i.e., withholding parental love [e.g., encouragement, support, safety]) and disseminating her antagonistic thoughts about Jen’s worth as a person. Multiple times, Jen self-identifies as her sledgehammering mother’s scapegoat, the whipping child to absorb her sadness and trauma. Perhaps Jen reminds Auntie Agnes too much of herself as a kid: she asks questions; she doesn’t know how to talk—a bad daughter. Still, the author tells the story with the emotional restraint that honestly excavates her pain in an ongoing way—“If I write about you, will I understand you better?”—and, quite remarkably, loves her mom.
This judicious love for Auntie Agnes seems radical. It would have been well within Jen’s rights, even as a person who is ethnically Chinese, to set strict boundaries with her mom. Perhaps reflecting the fact that she is the child out of the five whom Auntie Agnes deems the most Chinese, as it were, Jen will negotiate their relationship’s terms until Auntie’s death. Without absolving her mother of the cruelty she inflicts, the author lays out the facts and honors Auntie Agnes’s life.
The beauty in this honor extends beyond their mother-daughter relationship; Jen recognizes her responsibility to love her kids despite not having a role model to imitate closely. Again, this particular relationship does not have to function as a ubiquitous standard for daughter and mothers (or for any relationship marred by trauma). However, she offers grace, and this is all the more moving because of Jen’s age and the wisdom her life brings. As her adult daughter consoles, Jen did a good job of washing trauma’s effects in how she mothered; it already grows fainter.
I rate Bad Bad Girl 4.5 stars.
My thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for an ARC.
January 13, 2026
I think how you come to this book and how you rate it depends almost entirely on how you interacted with your mother.
As I read, I argued with Gish Jen, with her assumptions that her father favored her, that her mother was the one who favored her brother and failed to do right by her. Coming from a culture far more likely to hit, it was mostly her mother who hit her. It was her father who beat her with a metal garden stake, drawing blood and so injuring her that she missed PE for months. Her mother held her in place for that beating. Her mother also took a very challenging and disheartening full-time job to ensure she and her siblings could attend college. Her mother was the one who told her "no one will ever marry you," which was something she'd been told herself. And it was her mother who favored her younger, prettier sister. Like another reader, I might resent some aspects of her life—I am a lifelong class warrior—so I understood the complaints in her review, but in those last 20 pages, I finally didn't care that Jen is richer and smarter and more successful than I am, I wanted to sit down and talk to her about our mothers.
The story I found here, according to Jen's introduction, is a novel with some truth. Clearly, the discussion with her dead mother... and a few details are not perfectly aligned with my memory of what Gish Jen told me when I spent a week in workshop with her. She was wonderful and I was already a fan.
I realized, finally, near the end, that I was not arguing with Gish about her mother, but about my relationship with my own. Unkindness and even cruelty are not what we learned from our mothers, though we saw them modeled sometimes, we also recognize the pain they suffered from theirs.
Thank you, Gish. Now, I wish we could sit together over coffee or tea and talk about our mothers, about forgiveness and love, and about trying our best to be good, as eldest daughters are so inclined to do.
As I read, I argued with Gish Jen, with her assumptions that her father favored her, that her mother was the one who favored her brother and failed to do right by her. Coming from a culture far more likely to hit, it was mostly her mother who hit her. It was her father who beat her with a metal garden stake, drawing blood and so injuring her that she missed PE for months. Her mother held her in place for that beating. Her mother also took a very challenging and disheartening full-time job to ensure she and her siblings could attend college. Her mother was the one who told her "no one will ever marry you," which was something she'd been told herself. And it was her mother who favored her younger, prettier sister. Like another reader, I might resent some aspects of her life—I am a lifelong class warrior—so I understood the complaints in her review, but in those last 20 pages, I finally didn't care that Jen is richer and smarter and more successful than I am, I wanted to sit down and talk to her about our mothers.
The story I found here, according to Jen's introduction, is a novel with some truth. Clearly, the discussion with her dead mother... and a few details are not perfectly aligned with my memory of what Gish Jen told me when I spent a week in workshop with her. She was wonderful and I was already a fan.
I realized, finally, near the end, that I was not arguing with Gish about her mother, but about my relationship with my own. Unkindness and even cruelty are not what we learned from our mothers, though we saw them modeled sometimes, we also recognize the pain they suffered from theirs.
Thank you, Gish. Now, I wish we could sit together over coffee or tea and talk about our mothers, about forgiveness and love, and about trying our best to be good, as eldest daughters are so inclined to do.
November 20, 2025
[ 3.5/5 stars ]
This is a semi-biographical fiction about Gish Jen's mother and the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.
Spanning continents and generations, this daughter's memoir is an immersive family history that highlights Gish's mother as a fearless and rebellious daughter who is often called 'bad bad girl' for defying gender roles. Threads of immigration, assimilation and race are interwoven in a narrative that is loaded with politics and trauma, while one is able to delight in the pages full of culture - the clash between American x Chinese, of American dream and what is to be Chinese.
There are flawed characters and broken relationships which make their way with an emotional presence, especially when Jen lands the delivery by showing the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship, and its intimacy resonates. This feels all the more interesting as Jen exposes humorous and raw dialogues between the deceased mother and author, a creative touch that adds richness in a straight forward story.
What keeps me from fully embracing this book is that I would have loved a deeper focus on the other side of the family history (in China) and macro expansion into the (Chinese) politics. As much as we have read plenty of these topics, Jen's approach is far from trite, rather, this book is for those looking for a family history written with Asian readers in mind.
BAD BAD GIRL is a genre-bending novel that incorporates historical, literary and memoir in one. I enjoyed how refreshing and Chinese it is.
[ I received a complimentary copy from the publisher - Knopf publishing . All opinions are my own ]
This is a semi-biographical fiction about Gish Jen's mother and the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.
Spanning continents and generations, this daughter's memoir is an immersive family history that highlights Gish's mother as a fearless and rebellious daughter who is often called 'bad bad girl' for defying gender roles. Threads of immigration, assimilation and race are interwoven in a narrative that is loaded with politics and trauma, while one is able to delight in the pages full of culture - the clash between American x Chinese, of American dream and what is to be Chinese.
There are flawed characters and broken relationships which make their way with an emotional presence, especially when Jen lands the delivery by showing the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship, and its intimacy resonates. This feels all the more interesting as Jen exposes humorous and raw dialogues between the deceased mother and author, a creative touch that adds richness in a straight forward story.
What keeps me from fully embracing this book is that I would have loved a deeper focus on the other side of the family history (in China) and macro expansion into the (Chinese) politics. As much as we have read plenty of these topics, Jen's approach is far from trite, rather, this book is for those looking for a family history written with Asian readers in mind.
BAD BAD GIRL is a genre-bending novel that incorporates historical, literary and memoir in one. I enjoyed how refreshing and Chinese it is.
[ I received a complimentary copy from the publisher - Knopf publishing . All opinions are my own ]
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December 16, 2025It’s hard for me to rate this book for a lot of reasons. First, no matter what the author says, this book is primarily a memoir, not because of the nature of the book, but because of what it clearly means to the writer. While many of the facts may, as Gish Jen says, be imagined or invented, rendering this autofiction at best, the feeling of the book is wholly derived from Jen’s feelings about her mother, laid bare in these pages. And who I am to rate someone’s lived experience?
Second, the last 75 pages of the book trended, for me, to a four evolving by book’s end to a five-star, as the meditation on grief, the loss of one’s parents, and the complicated relationships we have with our mothers is masterfully handled there. But the rest of the book hovered more around three stars, generously. While I’m certain writing this was cathartic for Jen, it struggled to become more substantial than that for me; I was disinterested in the characters (real humans) and searching for direction or a more cogent plot line to get me through.
But, and thirdly, the book provides a unique and underserved examination of what happened in China in the 20th century that makes it worthwhile even where it’s otherwise tedious. I’m not sad I read it, but I’m not recommending it, either.
Second, the last 75 pages of the book trended, for me, to a four evolving by book’s end to a five-star, as the meditation on grief, the loss of one’s parents, and the complicated relationships we have with our mothers is masterfully handled there. But the rest of the book hovered more around three stars, generously. While I’m certain writing this was cathartic for Jen, it struggled to become more substantial than that for me; I was disinterested in the characters (real humans) and searching for direction or a more cogent plot line to get me through.
But, and thirdly, the book provides a unique and underserved examination of what happened in China in the 20th century that makes it worthwhile even where it’s otherwise tedious. I’m not sad I read it, but I’m not recommending it, either.
December 1, 2025
I have read several,of the author’s previous books and I loved this one. The mother/daughter relationship was painfully intimate and I could feel the pain. The depiction of the Chinese diaspora was of interest to me too.
January 25, 2026
Moving and honest, written uniquely in a way that makes perfect sense for the story. I learned a lot and I felt a lot.
December 14, 2025
Guess What: 5 stars.
Other things to know:
--Gish Jen once commented on my facebook post. I have no clue what the post was about.
--I think we call this autofiction, the blending of autobiography and fiction. Basically, I love it. It's brave, vulnerable, truth and fiction, and a writer's gotta do what a writer's gotta do.
Other things to know:
--Gish Jen once commented on my facebook post. I have no clue what the post was about.
--I think we call this autofiction, the blending of autobiography and fiction. Basically, I love it. It's brave, vulnerable, truth and fiction, and a writer's gotta do what a writer's gotta do.
November 4, 2025
Really interesting book. This isn’t necessarily a 5 star book that makes me want to tell everyone I know to read it, but I loved how it written so well and bit different (could’ve been 30ish pages shorter but). This book really made me think about family, generations before us shaping our childhood, etc. good book!
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November 11, 2025Not her best work 🫢
July 12, 2025
This book was not to my taste and I’m probably not the best audience for this book. Her definition of ‘abuse’ is very different from my definition and own experience. I felt it was windy and self-indulgent. Thank you NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for giving me the opportunity to read this advanced copy.
October 12, 2025
Autobiographical fiction is always a difficult genre to review. Conflict between mothers and daughters is fraught with anguish. Jen's mother left Shanghai in 1925 to go to college in America and never returned. she had a difficult relationship with her mother and unfortunately then had a difficult relationship with her own daughter, Gish.
I really enjoyed seeing the life of rich Chinese at that time in China, but knowing what was coming for them in the future was breaking my heart as I read.
Her, mother, named Agnes in her Catholic school was a brilliant woman who spoke English at school. She had her masters when she met her future husband, a Chinese man who came to Stanford and already had an engineering degree when they met and married. She immediately became pregnant so left school and never got her PHD. Their first child was the all important boy, and the second child was Lillian,later known as Gish.
Unfortunately, Agnes treated Gish ( who cried for her first 2 years because of an undiagnosed milk allergy) just as her mother had treated her, and they never had a close relationship. Even after another daughter and 2 more sons, Lillian was mistreated.
She never received affection and was the scapegoat for everyone.
The book is sort of a dialogue between Gish and her dead mother, and through flashbacks we learn of both of their lives.
It might be a difficult read if one has had a difficult mother daughter relationship, as I did. Fortunately for me I don't have my mother talking in my head and raised my daughters very differently than I was raised, as does Gish.
For anyone who does not know the history of the Japanese invasion of China, or the Cultural Revolution, this will be eye opening.
As I am quite familiar with the history, each look at it and each letter from Agnes's family was heart wrenching.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the EARC. This is my honest review.
I really enjoyed seeing the life of rich Chinese at that time in China, but knowing what was coming for them in the future was breaking my heart as I read.
Her, mother, named Agnes in her Catholic school was a brilliant woman who spoke English at school. She had her masters when she met her future husband, a Chinese man who came to Stanford and already had an engineering degree when they met and married. She immediately became pregnant so left school and never got her PHD. Their first child was the all important boy, and the second child was Lillian,later known as Gish.
Unfortunately, Agnes treated Gish ( who cried for her first 2 years because of an undiagnosed milk allergy) just as her mother had treated her, and they never had a close relationship. Even after another daughter and 2 more sons, Lillian was mistreated.
She never received affection and was the scapegoat for everyone.
The book is sort of a dialogue between Gish and her dead mother, and through flashbacks we learn of both of their lives.
It might be a difficult read if one has had a difficult mother daughter relationship, as I did. Fortunately for me I don't have my mother talking in my head and raised my daughters very differently than I was raised, as does Gish.
For anyone who does not know the history of the Japanese invasion of China, or the Cultural Revolution, this will be eye opening.
As I am quite familiar with the history, each look at it and each letter from Agnes's family was heart wrenching.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the EARC. This is my honest review.
January 19, 2026
Gish Jen’s Bad Bad Girl is called a novel, though Jen herself makes clear that it began as something closer to memoir. Writing about her fraught relationship with her late mother, she realized how much of her mother’s inner life—and early history—was unknowable, and fiction became not an escape hatch but a necessity. The result is a hybrid work that feels honest about its own limitations while still pushing toward emotional truth.
The book alternates between a largely straightforward account of her mother’s life—from a privileged but constricting upbringing in Shanghai through immigration to the United States—and imagined conversations between mother and daughter. These interludes are where the book becomes most interesting, as Jen interrogates not just her mother’s choices, but the act of telling this story at all. The tone is often wry, occasionally sharp, but ultimately compassionate, especially in how it traces the inheritance of expectations, disappointments, and emotional habits across generations.
What emerges is less an attempt at reconciliation than a sustained act of attention: to a woman shaped by exile, loss, and unrealized promise, and to a daughter trying to understand how love and damage coexist within families. Bad Bad Girl doesn’t resolve its tensions so much as sit with them, and that restraint is one of its strengths. It’s a thoughtful, formally interesting book that rewards readers willing to engage with its ambiguities.
The book alternates between a largely straightforward account of her mother’s life—from a privileged but constricting upbringing in Shanghai through immigration to the United States—and imagined conversations between mother and daughter. These interludes are where the book becomes most interesting, as Jen interrogates not just her mother’s choices, but the act of telling this story at all. The tone is often wry, occasionally sharp, but ultimately compassionate, especially in how it traces the inheritance of expectations, disappointments, and emotional habits across generations.
What emerges is less an attempt at reconciliation than a sustained act of attention: to a woman shaped by exile, loss, and unrealized promise, and to a daughter trying to understand how love and damage coexist within families. Bad Bad Girl doesn’t resolve its tensions so much as sit with them, and that restraint is one of its strengths. It’s a thoughtful, formally interesting book that rewards readers willing to engage with its ambiguities.
January 10, 2026
Wow! I would’ve never picked this up if not for my intention to final join a book club this year … and while it was hard to get started with this one I end it sobbing …. I am not an immigrant neither is my mother, but if you have ever had even the slightest bit of a challenging relationship with yours this is a read you need to explore even if you’re like me and insist it is beyond repair.
Poignant for me was the ending where the writers children expressed to her how lovingly she was able to mother them without having had that motherly love herself 😭😭😭😭
Poignant for me was the ending where the writers children expressed to her how lovingly she was able to mother them without having had that motherly love herself 😭😭😭😭
January 31, 2026
This was a hard read, but a very beautifully written book. I had a relatively similar upbringing to Gish Jen, and the way she captures abusive parental relationships with such empathy towards the parent *and* honesty is a feat. I think it’s hard to do that without slipping into the territory of misery porn, but she strikes that balance so well. It’s a story about how our parents are ultimately human, with their own traumas and life experiences they sometimes pass down, intentionally or not. The best way to describe this is it’s like a super morbid love letter
January 20, 2026
2.5. The writing is certainly good here. I just could not dig up much sympathy for the author. Her childhood seems to have been medium fine and she was able to take what her parents gave her and create a good life and career for herself. Not a lot of self reflection or interrogation of her mom’s significant trauma. Just … not the gut punch the author was expecting to deliver.
February 1, 2026
A heart breaking story about the ache to be seen, loved and understood by your mother, highlighting the segregation in culture/values when being a second generation immigrant, and the efforts to break intergenerational trauma. She captures a specific kind of mourning - not just for the person but for what the relationship could have/should have been. This one will stay with me for a while.
December 18, 2025
Wowowow this was a tough read but well worth it. The concept of a fictionalized biography of the author’s late mother is beautiful exercise in grief, forgiveness, and allowing space to be angry at those we want love the most.
December 29, 2025
I love books that make me love people
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