“ Be Good to Your Mother is a profound portrait of how a family’ s sense of truth is constructed and inherited, and of three generations of mothers bound by devotion and dread. ” — Rachel Aviv
From a brilliant, award-winning poet, a luminous, unsparing memoir that chronicles the simultaneous collapse of the author’ s sixteen-year marriage and her mother’ s diagnosis: an aneurysm in her heart waiting to blow “ like a submarine volcano” ; the twin events bring back the author’ s past of poverty and displacement, threatening to drown the life she thought she’ d made impervious for her own three children.
“ I thought I would never be free of my mother until I met my husband. Then I thought I could never leave my husband because he would hand me back to my mother. ”
In a Vermont cabin with no running water, Hillery Stone learned the rules of survival early: Sleep close to your mother. Recite the presidents in order when she’ s down. Never cut your hair. Above all, don’ t let her die.
Decades later, as Stone’ s marriage quietly collapses and a custody battle looms, her titanic, volatile mother falls— fracturing a hip and revealing an aneurysm growing silently on her heart. Suddenly, Stone is pulled, once again, toward the woman she has spent a lifetime trying to leave.
Moving through the houses that shaped four generations— a pink farmhouse, a Brooklyn apartment, the crumbling structures of her childhood— Stone traces a tangled inheritance: a grandfather who hanged himself, a grief-stricken poet grandmother, a mother who was both refuge and wreckage. Threaded with the lives of birds, octopuses, and the houses we cannot stop returning to, this is a fierce, clear-eyed reckoning with what it means to be “ born a mother. ”
Unsparing, darkly funny, and luminous, Be Good to Your Mother asks the question every daughter eventually faces: Can we ever truly leave the people who made us?
