It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks
A Memoir of a Mother and Daughter
-
-
5.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Life is a series of losses. I've decided to be very Zen about it. I have lost two husbands, my parents, my brother, countless friends; it is just one loss after another. You might as well get used to it." So muses the author's mother in this poignant and humorous memoir about mothers and daughters.
Loss is a way of life for both Catherine and her mother. But where it made the daughter ravenous for contact, it made the mother lose her appetite for people. While the two always had a fierce attachment, by turns intimate and tumultuous, decades of fractious and contentious and frustrating interactions found a reprieve after the birth of Catherine's daughter, Olive. Witty and direct, weaving back and forth in time, the book charts the transformation of this volatile and unique mother-daughter relationship from longing to connection.
A book about love, mortality, and the nature of family bonds, It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks is a must-read for anyone trying to navigate their way through the distance between their fantasies of love and the realities of family relationships.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Actress Burns, who has appeared on E.R. and Law and Order, has written a funny, touching mother and daughter memoir. Born in 1961 and nine when her father died, Burns felt she got no sympathy from her mother, who worried that her daughter would use people's pity to become manipulative. Besides, her mother said, "where is it written you have to be happy." As a teen, Burns suspected her mother was trying to get rid of her shipping her off to live with older step-siblings, sending her to boarding school so she could have fun with her male friends. Surviving drugs, sex and suicidal behavior, Burns went to college, started an acting career, married, had a child, divorced and discovered her mother again. The full circle of the maternal bond is what makes this memoir satisfying; readers see the daughter who schemed to get the attention of the mother whom she believed was self-centered become a mother herself and confront her own daughter's control ploys. When Burns tells her mom what readers have long suspected that her mother is her best friend her mother decides she herself is "finished being crazy" and they're both, finally, able to relax together.
