A Good Enough Daughter: A memoir - Hardcover

Shulman, Alix Kates

3.49

112 ratings by Goodreads

9780805241617: A Good Enough Daughter: A memoir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805241612 ISBN 13: 9780805241617

Publisher: Schocken, 1999

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At twenty, Alix Kates Shulman wrenched herself from her middle-class family and staked a claim to a fierce independence. From her bestselling novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, to her brilliant memoir, Drinking the Rain, she has chronicled what it means to defy the expectations of family and society in order to map one's own life. Now, in this unflinching but tender memoir, she explores what it means to do what is expected of a daughter--discovering in the process the unexpected, complicated joys of going home.

Told with the grace, clarity, and insight we have come to expect from her, A Good Enough Daughter is the story of Shulman's difficult journey from dependency to alienation to reconciliation, as she returns home to care for her aging parents in the last years of their lives. The intersection of her own memory with family documents discovered in her parents' house provides the structure for this riveting exploration of her life as a daughter.

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From the Publisher:

"I read A Good Enough Daughter in one sitting--I couldn't put it down. With stinging humor, penetrating insight, and her trademark directness, Alix Kates Shulman has crafted a narrative that rings with truth on every page. The emotional landscape of Shulman's family and her own examination of her younger self are stark, luminous, and moving. Anyone who has ever struggled with feelings of love and ambivalence for their own parents will be swept up by this gorgeous book."
-- Dani Shapiro, author of Slow Motion

"A Good Enough Daughter is an elegant and delightfully honest memoir of a girl's rebellion and a woman's resolution. In this beautifully written and captivating book, Alix Kates Shulman recalls her fierce struggle for independence from the parents she now is called upon to shepherd through their decline and death. In the process, she comes to understand that she not only can go home again but that she never fully left. Her story--written with wit, charm and a delicious sense of irony at life's plots--will strike a deep chord in all of us who must eventually seek reconciliation with the past we tried so hard to leave behind."
-- Lillian Rubin, author of The Transcendent Child: Tales of Triumph Over the Past

"A Good Enough Daughter is more than a good enough book. Alik Kates Shulman took that most fearful of journeys--the one back home."
-- Rita Mae Brown

"Once again, as she has done repeatedly since Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Alix Kates Shulman has provided an eloquent baedeker to the bumpy terrain modern women find themselves traversing. As more and more of us live to unprecedented ages, inheriting our parents' care, may we do so with Alix's grace, insight, and good humor."
-- Nancy Mairs, author of Remembering the Bone House

"Alix Kates Shulman takes on the most daunting of challenges a contemporary memoirist can face--a happy childhood and a loving set of parents--and brings it off triumphantly, thanks to her literary skill, compassion, sense of humor and incorruptible honesty. Here is that rarest form of memoir 'payback,' wherein even the narcissism of remorse has been understood and purified. The result is a uniquely wise, perceptive, bittersweet and emotionally satisfying book."
-- Philip Lopate,author of Portrait of My Body and The Art of the Personal Essay

"A stunning memoir; Alix Kates Shulman is a brilliant and completely captivating writer."
-- Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., author of The Dance of Anger and The Mother Dance

From the Back Cover:

"Once again, Alix Kates Shulman showers gifts of insight on her readers, in this wonderfully wise, achingly honest memoir. . . . Everybody on these pages comes across with the vivid immediacy of life."
--Rebecca Goldstein, author of Mazel

"A stunning memoir. Shulman is a brilliant and completely captivating writer."
--Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., author of The Dance of Anger

"Shulman takes on the most daunting of challenges a contemporary memoirist can face--a happy childhood and a loving set of parents--and brings it off triumphantly in this uniquely wise, perceptive, bittersweet, and emotionally satisfying book."
--Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body

"As more and more of us live to unprecedented ages, inheriting our parents' care, may we do so with Alix's grace, insight, and good humor."
--Nancy Mairs, author of Remembering the Bone House

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