In the meantime, I have a pile of books on my shelf that I thought I would share with you. They are memoirs of sorts written by women. And yes, they are written about their mothers or about their journeys with their daughters. As many of us know, mother/daughter is a complicated relationship. More complicated for some than for others. Perhaps out of curiosity, I have read a number of these and as a Mother’s Day gift to you, I thought I would summarize each to give you a head start on deciding what to read or not. Oh, and even though my son is graduating from college, we still have three complcated girls in our lives, so mother/daughter is very close to my heart.

When I Married My Mother, by former New York radio host Jo Maeder.

This is one of the first books I wrote about here at Working Mother. It is a woman’s journey back into the life of a mother she did not know well at a time when both women needed each other. A poignant tale of the difficult end-of-life years that will touch anyone who has been touched by the demands of eldercare. And it will make you laugh as much as cry. They have a unique story and she never tries to show you anything other than that. For more of my thoughts on this book, read: Mama Care.

For You Mom, Finally, by food writer and former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl (and published under the hardcover title Not Becoming My Mother: and other things she taught me along the way.

In the foreword and other places, Ruth admits she thought she would write a book about a lost generation of women from the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, who found themselves forced to choose between marriage and work, even if they had educations or jobs before they put rings on their fingers. Instead, she wrote a short but complicated book about her mother, a woman who’s moods swung in so many directions that her children worried about what embarrassment might come next. And whose marriage and relationships with other adults suffered. It is not in any measure a book about a generation. It is just Ruth’s story about her mom, and her grandmother’s influence on both of them. She spins the yarn that tells us her mother warned her not to be like her – hence the original hardcover title: Not Becoming My Mother…  It was a short read, as I said, but I am not sure if it was compelling, (I rarely don’t finish what I start), just a well-written tale by a professional writer. Some publications (USA Today, Christian Science Monitor) reported the name change was made to hit the Mother’s Day gift audience. Hmm?

My Teenage Werewolf, A Mother. A Daughter. A Journey through the Thicket of Adolescence by Lauren Kessler, with help from her daughter, Lizzie.

I am not sure Lauren would call this a memoir but that’s how I see it. Here is another book that started out somewhere and ended up somewhere else. The catchy title with the focus on pre-teen and teen daughters (I have three of those.) got me in, along with the cover photo of a bubble-blowing girl-on-the-verge-of-teen, It began with science for the laywoman about the evolving adolescent brain along with examples of door slamming, eye rolling, shouting, fights over appropriate clothing and other normal teen behavior, like rooms where you need to cut a path through dirty clothes to get from one side to the other. I thought we would bond and I would get some good advice. Somewhere, the really interesting stuff stopped and I found myself reading a book about a mom who tracked her daughter for a year under the guise of doing journalistic research into middle school life. No kid is every kid. And this 7^th/8^th –grade girl wrestler with boyfriends in tow was certainly not any of my daughters. So there you have it. The first couple of chapters were worth reading and worth talking about, and then it wasn’t. The mother/daughter duo continues to blog, if you want a glimpse of them.

All Things At Once by Mika Brezinski, an MSNBC journalist and show host.

This is Mika's story of struggling to be a television journalist, rising above the idiosyncrasies of broadcasting, marrying a great guy and raising a family. Her take is, you can do everything at once and make choices about what has to give each time. As a former broadcast journalist with four children, it was clear to me that "the give" could often be too hard because of the 24/7 demands of the business.  But for some women and their husbands it can work. Mika lays out her case. Some may doubt her choices; others may find them liberating. And at the same time she takes us through her life, the life-threatening moment of being attacked as a girl, her fall down a flight of stairs as a mom with her infant in her arms; and a life made further interesting by the fact that she had a famous belt-way dad - Zbigniew Brezinzki - the National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. He was the keynote speaker at my Fordham University graduation.  But, I was not so interested in the family name as Mika's mom, who I knew nothing about before this book. She is painted here as a woman who supported her husband but not happily, and was glad to have her turn out of the Washington, DC limelight. Is this a literary tour de force? No. But an interesting look at a modern woman now in the spotlight as co-host of a national morning show on MSNBC, Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough. Not a must read, but if you are curious about the lives of people you see on TV, this is certainly an honest momoir worth parsing.