Every Woman I've Ever Loved: Lesbian Writers on Their Mothers

by Catherine Reid (Editor), Holly Iglesias (Editor)

"I have wanted to find my mother in every woman I've ever loved," writes Catherine Reid in the introduction to this refreshingly complex and original anthology. "I have ached to find traces of her smell, her touch, the way she would cradle the back of my head, her songs. I had to turn forty before I could admit that to myself or acknowledge how often a similar yearning shows up in the people around me. Relationships with mothers are complicated for everyone - men and women, heterosexual, gay and bisexual. But for lesbians, that core relationship is especially powerful, blessed (or burdened) with a multiplicity of emotions and desires. In Every Woman I've Ever Loved, an impressive line-up of lesbian authors examines the mother/daughter relationship .... in essays, poems and dramatic monoloogues, and even one photo essay. As women who love women, these writers bring passionate intensity and complicated depths to this fundamental, first love. Dorothy Allison, Gloria Anzalda, Claudia Bepko, Meg Daly, Jyl Lynn Felman , Marilyn Hacker, Holly Hughes, Audre Lorde, Laura Markowitz, Jane Miller, Cherre Moraga, Joan Nestle, Linda Niemann, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mattie Richardson , Maureen Seaton, Mab Segrest, Shay Youngblood and others.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer, Anthologies, Lesbian

213 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1997

Reviews

[TC · Rating 5 out of 5]

when i was 23 or 24, this book pretty much rocked my world.

[didi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew up reading Bala like some famous painting, examining the lines around her mouth and eyes for hidden meanings, for the stories I knew were buried there. She did not talk about what hurt her. For many years—as a child, a teenager and through my twenties—I devoted myself to reading the lines on Bala's face. I defined myself as a child of Holocaust survivors, privy to a kind of depravity that my friends knew nothing about, crying with the pain of her life, unable to locate myself in my life or consider its mundane features as worthy of the kind of attention I gave to her large and shocking story. The tragedy of her loss was a searing scar across my lungs. Every time I breathed in, I felt her.
Bala mothered, silent about the sources of her pain. As I grew older, I could fill in the cellular knowledge I had of her suffering with facts about the Holocaust, but my main source of information was my visceral response to her. I called her a protective mother, yet felt equally protective of her. Her English was poor for the first few years in America. I became her translator. I tried to protect her from social gaffes, untrained as she was in the norms of small-town America. I stood in front of her in crowds, ready to deflect any- one who might bump or jostle her; I carried the groceries, opened doors for her; I was her courtier, she, my wounded queen.

[Shoshana Kerewsky]

Clay [prose] (Shoshana T. Daniel)