Description
A fascinating new volume of messages about motherhood, from the author of the bestselling Letters of Note collections. In Letters of Note: Mothers, Shaun Usher gathers together exceptional missives by and about mothers, celebrating the joy and grief, humour and frustration, wisdom and sacrifice the role brings to both parent and child.
A young Egyptian girl mourns her mother’s death in the fourth century AD. Melissa Rivers lovingly chides her mother, Joan, for treating her house like a hotel and taking her thirteen-year-old son to see Last Tango in Paris. Anne Sexton gives her daughter the advice to live life to the hilt, and be your own woman. In a letter to her teenage daughter, Caitlin Moran explains that some boys are as evil as vampires, and you must drive stakes through their hearts. The film Ladybird inspires journalist Hannah Woodhead to write an emotional letter to her mother. While at seminary, Martin Luther King Jr. writes that he has “the best mother in the world.” These thirty letters capture the endless range of feelings that comes with being or having a mother. Includes letters from E.B. White, George Bernard Shaw, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath, Laura Dern, Baya Hocine, Louisa May Alcott, Wallac Stegner, and more.
Mothers have been on my mind so I was attracted to this new entry in Usher’s “Letters of Note” series. In the middle of all the uprising and strife worldwide in the past year, there is one thing we all have in common – we all made someone a mother by our very existence.
Usher captures great joy, fear, anger, heartbreak, disappointment, love and hate in these letters, which include mothers and children from all over the globe. There is darkness here to be true, but there is even more light and hope.
Last year, my daughter gave me a subscription to Storyworth, a service that provides a weekly writing prompt which results in a book at the end of the year. The prompts include questions about important events, people, and experiences in your life. In reading over the prompts and my responses, I noted that I mention my mother or my grandmother in nearly every one. My children never had the chance to know either my mother or grandmother, so they only have my stories. These two women, Arline and Helen, shaped me and still whisper guidance in my ear. They taught me how to strive to be a good person and I know I have been blessed to have had them in my life.
My mother’s wake was held on Mother’s Day 1984, so the holiday has never been a favored one in my family. This year, I will remember these stories and tell them again to my children so they can know, in a small way, the wisdom and love I received from my mother and grandmother.
I was not familiar with this series by the author, but enjoyed this one so much I’m going to find the others. Recommended.
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