What do you think?
Rate this book
Motherland: A Memoir
Pamela Marin was fourteen when her mother died of breast cancer. After keeping her illness a secret from her daughter, Mildred Marin left her home in Evanston, Illinois, to spend her last months alone and without treatment in California. When she died in 1973, her husband buried the family's memories with her -- clearing the house of her belongings, avoiding any mention of her, and never once taking his young daughter to her mother's grave. Before Marin was out of her teens, her father went bankrupt and moved in with his thirty-years-younger girlfriend. Now in this luminous memoir, written with rare grace and unflinching honesty, Marin chronicles how she came to reject her father's dismissal of the past and ultimately to embark on a cross- country search for traces of the mother she never really knew.
With family and home gone, Marin got to work supporting herself, first as a waitress in Chicago's northside bars, then as a secretary, and finally as a journalist, landing a job as a staff writer at a newspaper in Southern California when she was twenty-seven. Two years later, happily ensconced in a beach house with the man who would become her husband and the father of her children, Marin began to dream about the mother who'd been gone for more than half her life. Those haunting dreams led to the quest at the heart of Motherland .
Fifteen years after Mildred Marin's death, the author dropped out of her own life to research her mother's. Using her reporter's skills, Marin traveled to Tennessee, where her mother was born and reared; to Chicago, where her mother worked as a commercial artist and met the man she would marry; and back to California, where Mildred Marin went to die. Along the way, Marin collected treasured artifacts as well as others' memories of her mother. She confronted her father about the silence that enshrouded his wife's illness and death, causing a rift in their relationship that would last until he died a decade later.
Motherland is a journey shot through with love and pain. It is a story of loss, discovery, and, ultimately, forgiveness. By coming to terms with her mother's life, Pamela Marin opened the way for the emotional intimacy she had craved as a child -- and finally found in her own motherhood.
With family and home gone, Marin got to work supporting herself, first as a waitress in Chicago's northside bars, then as a secretary, and finally as a journalist, landing a job as a staff writer at a newspaper in Southern California when she was twenty-seven. Two years later, happily ensconced in a beach house with the man who would become her husband and the father of her children, Marin began to dream about the mother who'd been gone for more than half her life. Those haunting dreams led to the quest at the heart of Motherland .
Fifteen years after Mildred Marin's death, the author dropped out of her own life to research her mother's. Using her reporter's skills, Marin traveled to Tennessee, where her mother was born and reared; to Chicago, where her mother worked as a commercial artist and met the man she would marry; and back to California, where Mildred Marin went to die. Along the way, Marin collected treasured artifacts as well as others' memories of her mother. She confronted her father about the silence that enshrouded his wife's illness and death, causing a rift in their relationship that would last until he died a decade later.
Motherland is a journey shot through with love and pain. It is a story of loss, discovery, and, ultimately, forgiveness. By coming to terms with her mother's life, Pamela Marin opened the way for the emotional intimacy she had craved as a child -- and finally found in her own motherhood.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
19 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 31, 2024
My Thinking Changed As I Read
Having lost my own dearly loved Mom 10 months ago, the title of the book, "Motherland" caught my attention. I read the brief description, purchased the book and began to read. There were a few places early on where I briefly lost track as it went from times past to present day for the author or vice versa. But that really didn't affect me beyond my initially having to reorient myself or look back a few paragraphs.
What DID make an impression (albeit initially a neutral and then a negative one before changing yet again) was the starkness of the story. To a child, the mother is everything! It is the "first love" and how we learn our value. Our mom is ideally our secure base, a soft place to fall so to speak along with dad. When that bond is interrupted in infancy or early childhood, the effect is profound. For Pamela Marin, the author, losing her mother to breast cancer at the age of 14, and having her emotionally distant father remarry quickly and taking everything that was her mom's (including her wedding ring) and giving it to the new stepmother was a huge betrayal and compounded the loss. Yet oddly, the reader initially might not get that impression as there didn't seem to be much emotional connection to the loss.
And then we read further and learn another piece of the story. Mom went to a Baptist church and took the author with her when Pam was still a child. Dad was a Christian Scientist who believed illness and death were all in the mind. He would go to his service and take Pam's brother with him. As the kids mom's cancer progressed, Pam later learned her mom had decided to try the Christian Scientist beliefs. Pam remembers her mom being away "on vacation" when she died but later as an adult on a trip to her mother's hometown learns the trip to California was not a vacation but essentially a Christian Scientist rest facility. Her mother basically went there and died alone, many miles from her husband and children -- the latter of whom were kept in the dark so to speak.
That stark image, dying alone and away from family members and friends made me wonder if the lack of emotion early on, was a way to illustrate that very concept of a sterile, NON home like environment. That sense of being emotionally distant, almost like trying to be prim and proper during a major surgery resonates in this memoir, from the child Pam as a young adult having little memory of her mom to the later revealing of her mom dying hundreds of miles away in a religious facility with no family or pain meds, to the author's father who I strongly disliked because he struck me as distant, uncaring and totally self centered, the starkness I sensed almost feels like a literary device!
Like Pam's growing knowledge of her mother and her own home life as an adult becoming much more full and fulfilling, the book too becomes more satisfying.
Having lost my own dearly loved Mom 10 months ago, the title of the book, "Motherland" caught my attention. I read the brief description, purchased the book and began to read. There were a few places early on where I briefly lost track as it went from times past to present day for the author or vice versa. But that really didn't affect me beyond my initially having to reorient myself or look back a few paragraphs.
What DID make an impression (albeit initially a neutral and then a negative one before changing yet again) was the starkness of the story. To a child, the mother is everything! It is the "first love" and how we learn our value. Our mom is ideally our secure base, a soft place to fall so to speak along with dad. When that bond is interrupted in infancy or early childhood, the effect is profound. For Pamela Marin, the author, losing her mother to breast cancer at the age of 14, and having her emotionally distant father remarry quickly and taking everything that was her mom's (including her wedding ring) and giving it to the new stepmother was a huge betrayal and compounded the loss. Yet oddly, the reader initially might not get that impression as there didn't seem to be much emotional connection to the loss.
And then we read further and learn another piece of the story. Mom went to a Baptist church and took the author with her when Pam was still a child. Dad was a Christian Scientist who believed illness and death were all in the mind. He would go to his service and take Pam's brother with him. As the kids mom's cancer progressed, Pam later learned her mom had decided to try the Christian Scientist beliefs. Pam remembers her mom being away "on vacation" when she died but later as an adult on a trip to her mother's hometown learns the trip to California was not a vacation but essentially a Christian Scientist rest facility. Her mother basically went there and died alone, many miles from her husband and children -- the latter of whom were kept in the dark so to speak.
That stark image, dying alone and away from family members and friends made me wonder if the lack of emotion early on, was a way to illustrate that very concept of a sterile, NON home like environment. That sense of being emotionally distant, almost like trying to be prim and proper during a major surgery resonates in this memoir, from the child Pam as a young adult having little memory of her mom to the later revealing of her mom dying hundreds of miles away in a religious facility with no family or pain meds, to the author's father who I strongly disliked because he struck me as distant, uncaring and totally self centered, the starkness I sensed almost feels like a literary device!
Like Pam's growing knowledge of her mother and her own home life as an adult becoming much more full and fulfilling, the book too becomes more satisfying.
August 3, 2024
With all due respect, I have no idea why somebody heard Marin's pitch for this memoir and thought, "Yeah, people will definitely like that!" I also have no idea why I thought I would be one of those people. I'm just grateful it was a relatively quick read.
December 8, 2007
The author's mother died of breast cancer when Pamela was 14 and her father shut down after his wife's death. The author recounts her journey into her family's past. The book is not only her mother's biography but also a partial autobiography of Marin. It was an interesting book, moved along at a nice pace, but something was missing and I'm not exactly sure what it was. I felt the author was holding back, and it gave the author's prose a feeling of disingenuousness for me.
May 13, 2015
This book will resonate with any woman who lost her mom at an early age, especially those of us who lost our moms in the 1970s.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews