How to Manage Your Mother

by Alyce Faye Cleese, Brian Bates

Guilt. Affection. Embarrassment. Friendship. Anger. Love. Who can bring out all these feelings...and often in the same day? Your mother. No matter how mature or successful we are in our adult lives, with one word our mothers can somehow send us scurrying back to childhood. Can mothers and adult children ever learn to set aside their earlier relationship and talk to each other as adults? In this warm, funny book, dozens of revealing stories from such well-known personalities as Colin Powell, Helena Bonham Carter, Mia Farrow, and Lauren Hutton show that it is possible to improve your relationship with your mother -- or at the very least begin to understand it. Alyce Faye Cleese and Brian Bates include a practical ten-step plan and questionaire to help you get on track with your mother. You will learn to address specific issues and develop valuable insights that will help you start thinking about your mother in a profoundly new way.

Genres: Self Help, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2000

Reviews

[Oznasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

How do you get on with your mother? This book convinced me that having issues with your mother is perfectly normal. Psychotherapist, Alyce Faye Cleese interviewed over 100 well-known people about their mothers. This included Michael Caine, Helena Bonham Carter, John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Mia Farrow, Peter Gabriel, Hugh Hefner, Steve Martin, Liam Neeson, Michael Palin, Colin Powell, Keith Richards and others from various fields. They each had one thing in common—issues with their mother.

The book is entertaining as it includes many funny anecdotes as well as a few sad stories. It helped me to be more at peace with my mother. I could see my relationship with my mother reflected in some of the stories. I recommend this book to anyone who has a mother. Also, I recommend it to anyone who is a mother, no matter how old your children are, as it may help you to avoid some of the negativity that is commonly inflicted onto children by mothers who of course are only trying to do their best.

[Yvonne O'Connor · Rating 1 out of 5]

A kind of self-help book that draws on real-life stories to look at the relationship between mothers and adult children. Drawing on early childhood experience, the author urges people to make some sort of peace with their mothers wherever possible.

I suppose it is my own fault for believing that a book would really give legitimate advice on how to remedy a relationship, but I read this whole diatribe in such hopes. Sadly, the book seemed to only make excuses for those "bad" mothers and put the focus on the children to either accept this, or work on making changes today. Where is the option of choosing to live without? Severely disappointing.

[Kathy Cramer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Be kind and understanding. Nothing new.

[Brennan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird book. Just read the title.