"The author's daughter was born with a very rare genetic syndrome and faced a daunting prognosis: she would be a fraction of normal size, have innumerable physical and mental difficulties and likely a shortened lifespan. Now, at age eight she is attending standard public school classes. This is the story of her family's journey"--

Follows the story of four lifelong friends, whose lives are filled with joy and heartbreak, and shows how their experiences have affected the hopes and dreams they hold for each of their children.

A daughter Ellen, gives up her job and boyfriend to take care of her dying mother. Her father, a gifted professor of an English department, is more occupied with having his life running as smoothly as possible than caring for his wife. Living at home, Ellen discovers many new aspects to her parents' personalities, a father who is human despite his imperfections and a mother who loves her family passionately. When her mother finally dies Ellen is suspected...

The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's memoir of the year she and her mother Helen spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Katie urged Helen, set in her ways at 77, to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie's teenage daughter. Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and her mother would become friends, and that Helen would...

"If you think Joan Rivers said funny, outrageous, and ridiculous things ONSTAGE, wait 'til you read the funny, outrageous, and ridiculous things she said OFFSTAGE...things that will make you laugh out loud...and keep Melissa in therapy for the foreseeable future. The only thing my mother loved more than making people laugh was lying...or as she'd say, "embellishing." Her motto was: "Why let the truth ruin a good story?" This book contains some of...

"In A Mountain of Crumbs, Elena Gorokhova describes coming of age behind the Iron Curtain and leaving her mother and her motherland for a new life in the United States. Now, in Russian Tattoo, Elena learns that the journey of an immigrant is filled with everyday mistakes, small humiliations, and a loss of dignity. Cultural disorientation comes in the form of not knowing how to eat a hamburger, buy a pair of shoes, or catch a bus. But through perseverance...

"The story of Gail Lukasik's mother's passing, Gail's struggle with the shame of her mother's choice, and her subsequent journey of self-discovery and redemption"--Amazon.com.

Gile's childhood had been spent in doctor's offices; she spent nearly every waking moment at her mother's side. As Nyna grew up, her mother became more and more distant. Carolyn Scott Reybold had been a model in 1947, a friend of Grace Kelly, and even a bridesmaid at her wedding. How had that confident, glamorous woman become the mother Giles knew growing up-- the mother who was now living in a shelter? In her journey to uncover her mother's past,...

Her mother, Gloria, was a brainy knockout whose fierce wit could shock an audience into hilarity or silence. Her father was James Jones, the award-winning author of From Here to Eternity and other acclaimed novels of World War II . Kaylie Jones grew up amid such family friends as William Styron, Irwin Shaw, James Baldwin, and Willie Morris, and socialized with the likes of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut. When her father died from...

"A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy."--Dust jacket. At nineteen Trethewey's world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the...