Not Becoming My Mother

Not Becoming My Mother

She was not a great writer, or a great businesswoman, or even, if truth be told, a particularly good mother. I think she tried to be a good wife, but she wasn't much at keeping house, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who was a worse cook.

But my mother was a great example of everything I didn't want to be, and to this day I wake up every morning grateful that I'm not her. Grateful, in fact, not to be any of the women of her generation, who were unlucky enough to have been born at what seems to me to have been the worst possible time to have been a middle-class American women.

And so today, when people ask, "Why do you work so hard?" I think of my mother who was not allowed to do it, and say, "Because I can."

On what would have been her mother's one hundred birthday, Ruth Reichl opens a long-forgotten box of her mother's old letters and diaries and through them, discovers a women she never really knew.

What follows is a heartbreakingly honest investigation into her mother's life, where Ruth uncovers the hopes, dreams, struggles and fears of her mother as a young woman and the world of early twenty first century America before bringing us back to the present to learn her final, valuable lesson from her mother.

Intimate and beautiful, Ruth Reichl's, Not Becoming My Mother, will have you examining your own relationship with your mother and hoping to see a family resemblance.

Ruth Reichl is the editor-in-chief of Gourmet and the author of three best-selling memoirs, Comfort Me With Apples, Tender at the Bone, and Garlic and Sapphires and was the editor for the comprehensive Gourmet Cookbook. She has been the restaurant critic of The New York Times and the food editor and restaurant critic of the Los Angeles Times.

Not Becoming My Mother
Allen and Unwin
Author: Ruth Reichl
Price: $26.99