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It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks: A Memoir of a Mother and Daughter

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A recommendation by SusanW

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Burns writes in spare, lean prose. What she finds as she delves into the mother-daughter relationship is that there is no one right way to love a child, no one truth about how to mother. Instead, like all of us, she finds that the ideal picture of motherhood that we all carry with us has nothing to do with the day-to-day of loving a real child: "My daughter, who was supposed to spend her childhood basking in the warm glow of my idyllic maternal love, is having a time-out in the next room. And I am in a foul fucking mood about shit that has nothing to do with her." The revelation that motherhood is hard, that children are trying, that perfection is a lie, isn't new or startling; what is new and startling is Burns' ability to talk about how a mother can seemingly fail her child and be a good mother all at once.