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As a reader, mother-daughter stories like this have resonated
with me since I was a preteen obsessed with Anne Frank’s
diary. My own experience as a daughter was unlike the fraught
relationships portrayed in most memoirs, but I still reread their
pages endlessly, studying the universal adolescent desire to both
accept and reject a parent.

For Mother’s Day this year, while stuck in California and
unable to visit my mom abroad in the Netherlands for the
foreseeable future, I decided to revisit memoirs that have
provided comfort through their relatability over the years. My
life isn’t exactly like those of my beloved memoir writers, but so
many details and stories ring true, almost bringing me back to
being in close proximity to my mom.

Here are a few memoirs that I’ve found particularly
compelling as the daughter of a Jewish mother over the years.

Just recently, the essay collection “What My Mother and I
Don’t Talk About” reminded me how daughters can put their
mothers’ lives under a microscope — searching for a blueprint on
how to develop bravery, courage and other life skills. The writer
Sari Botton’s contribution (15 writers contributed essays) features
her observations of the men in her mother’s life, including how
the Chanukah gifts she received would depend on the male part-
ner of the time. Ultimately, she chronicles the marriages as a lens
to examine her mother’s generous and resilient spirit.

In college, I devoured Julie Klam’s debut “Please Excuse My
Daughter,” about the privileged childhood in Bedford, New York,
that left her unable to navigate her world as a grown-up. Some
28 MAY 14, 2020
books find us at the right time, and this author helped me feel
less alone during a stage where one is expected to have acquired
more wisdom about life than I had.

Reading sections about the department store shopping sprees
that Klam’s mother dragged her to during school time, I thought
about my own brushes with missing school for an unnecessary
reason. I’d summer with my mother and her parents in the
Midwest, and sometimes we’d stay too long and I’d miss the
beginning of the school year back in the Netherlands, where
I grew up. My mother wrote notes for my Dutch high school
teachers on the plane on the back of airsickness bags.

“What will I tell the teacher?” I asked, worrying about how
her paper of choice made me look.

“Tell him your mother works,” she would say.

Klam’s mother has three sisters. She writes how the “Jewish
Gang of Four” encourages her to embrace a performative brand
of womanhood. To me, my mother was as chic and stylish as
Marcia Klam, insisting on new outfits for both of us every time
the High Holidays came around.

In “For You, Mom. Finally,” Ruth Reichl writes about my
grandmother’s generation. I was in my mid-20s when the book
came out, wanting to know how Reichl, one of my favorite food
writers, had arrived there. The answer lies in her opportunity to
deviate from the path of her mother, whom she describes as born
in the worst time to be a middle-class American woman.

“She wasn’t much at keeping house and I don’t think I’ve ever
met anyone who was a worse cook,” Reichl writes.

THE GOOD LIFE
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