My mother was killed while crossing the street to catch the city bus into work. I was 27 at the time. Having already lost my father to lung cancer exactly 10 years prior, I was now faced with having to return home to care for a grandmother I wasn't very close to, who was also in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's. I had no support to speak of, but thankfully I was aware enough to know I needed help. I reached out to community supports and my own therapist to begin to process the loss of my mother but also my early adulthood. That’s when I purchased this book.

“Our psyches seem to protect us until we’re able to confront the pain, and then the internal alarm clock rings, telling us it’s time to wake up and go to work.”

— Hope Edelman

Motherless Daughters is an exploration into the lives of motherless women. All hailing from various backgrounds and experiences, participants were either interviewed in person or provided data using several internet surveys. It spent 24 weeks on the NY Times Bestsellers List and is Edelman’s first book, an incredible feat for any writer. She has since gone on to publish eight other non-fiction titles including, The After Grief: Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss.

I enjoyed this read and could certainly see myself in many of the women interviewed. I liked how the author described different attachment styles motherless daughters may adopt as a way to cope with their loss and felt she did an excellent job normalizing how women in various stages of development may react to the loss of their mother. I think she did an excellent job at factoring in aspects of motherly neglect, abandonment and abuse as these daughters are often left feeling unloved and unlovable with difficulty establishing secure attachments. She also considers the orphaned daughter and acknowledges how significant milestones like marriage, childbirth, graduation, a new job etc., are often a solitary celebration until the daughter is able to establish new meaningful relationships and attachments.

The author described her own experience of losing her mother to breast cancer and shared multiple accounts of how this kind of loss impacts surviving family members. Edelman shines a light on the need for all family members to be able to share their experience and the fact that quite often, communication among the family is stalled or non-existent - an important takeaway. The only criticism of the book is that I wished the author would have focused on a few key survey participants that we could track throughout the book rather than including the first hand accounts of so many. This would have further highlighted the existence of resilience and hope in the experiences of great loss. However, I think the author wanted to share varied experiences so readers could find themselves in the pages of the book and not feel like their experience is at all strange or abnormal.

All in all, I found it to be an excellent read for those experiencing loss themselves or for those supporting a person through the loss of a mother. I give it 4 out 5 stars!