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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
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English

MOTHERLAND

Elissa Altman

A Memoir of Beauty, Time and Aging

James Beard award-winner, Elissa Altman, captures the universal story of mothers and daughters, their
visceral longing for nurturing and sustenance, and the ultimate role-reversal that comes with age.
How does a fifty-something food writer dedicated to the act of feeding other people nourish her anorexic, octogenarian, personality-disordered former television singer/model New Yorker mother as she grows older? How does she care for her -- - spend time with and coddle her --- when they have never actually liked each other?

At its core, MOTHERLAND will tell a story of mothers and daughters and the gulf between us, and how we live and age together no matter who we are: confounded by each other as if we were both from Mars, desperately wanting to love each other but not knowing how and somehow, against all odds and in spite of our history, succeeding. The story of MOTHERLAND will end as every middle aged daughter of every elderly narcissistic personality disordered mother prays it will: with a truce --- fragile, tentative, and deeply tender --- that is as moving as it is universally enlightening.

Elissa Altman is the author of the critically acclaimed memoirs Treyf and Poor Man's Feast as well as the James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name. She wrote the Washington Post column,"Feeding My Mother," that this book expands upon and her work has appeared everywhere from OnBeing.org and O, The Oprah Magazine to Tin House, the New York Times, The Guardian and the TEDx stage, and has been anthologized for five consecutive years in Best Food Writing.
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Published 2019-08-01 by Ballantine Books

Comments

Washington Post columnist Altman (Poor Man's Feast) shares the intimate and fascinating story of her alternately loving, turbulent, and toxic relationship with her mother Throughout her life Altman struggles to balance devotion to her mother with a need to maintain boundaries for her own self-preservation, all of which comes to a moment of clarity when Altman decides to have children. Altman's memoir is an incisive look at complex mother-daughter attachments. -- Publishers Weekly

I'm reading this book right now and loving it! -- Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild

An acclaimed food writer and memoirist's account of the codependent relationship she had with her charming and outrageous—but also very difficult—mother. . Funny, raw, and tender, Altman's book examines the inevitable role reversals that occur in parent-child relationships while laying bare a mother-daughter relationship that is both entertaining and excruciating. An eloquent, poignant memoir. -- Kirkus

Rarely has a mother-daughter relationship been excavated with such honesty. Elissa Altman is a beautiful, big-hearted writer who mines her most central subject: her gorgeous, tempestuous, difficult mother, and the terrain of their shared life. The result is a testament to the power of love and family. - Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

A wry and moving meditation on aging and the different kinds of love between women. -- The Oprah Magazine (2019's Best LGBTQ Books)

It's a braided daisy chain, this mother-love. She loves me, she loves me not. I love her, I love her not. For an only child in a glamorous, glittery world, perhaps it's more chain than daisy. Elissa Altman uses her wit, heart, moxie, and everything she has ever learned, to both love and free herself, from an impossible, never-say-die mother. She does it with scintillating, unsparing prose. I couldn't quit them; I didn't want to. Honor to them both. --Jacki Lyden, Author, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

Elissa Altman's Motherland traces the history of a particularly complicated relationship. Wise, evocative, rich in insight, this compassionate and beautiful memoir is ultimately an act of love. - Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl