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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} What My Mother Gave Me Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most by Elizabeth Benedict Elizabeth Benedict, Mameve Medwed, and Charlotte Silver, What My Mother Gave Me. In What My Mother Gave Me , women look at the relationships between mothers and daughters through a new lens: a daughter’s story of a gift from her mother that has touched her to the bone and served as a model, a metaphor, or a touchstone in her own life. The contributors of these thirty-one original pieces include Pulitzer Prize winners, perennial bestselling novelists, and celebrated broadcast journalists. Collectively, the pieces have a force that feels as elemental as the tides: outpourings of lightness and darkness; joy and grief; mother love and daughter love; mother love and daughter rage. In these stirring words we find that every gift, no matter how modest, tells the story of a powerful bond. As Elizabeth Benedict points out in her introduction, whether we are mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, or cherished friends, we may not know for quite some time which presents will matter the most. Elizabeth Benedict is the author of five novels, including the bestseller Almost and the National Book Award finalist Slow Dancing , as well as The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers. She is the editor of the anthology Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. She has written for numerous publications including the New York Times, Boston Globe , and Huffington Post and two of her essays were Notable Essays in Best American Essay Collections. Mameve Medwed is the author of the novels Mail, Host Family, The End of an Error, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life and Of Men and Their Mothers. Her stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in, among others, the New York Times, Gourmet, Boston Globe , the Missouri Review, Newsday , and the Washington Post . Charlotte Silver is the author of the bestseller Charlotte au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood. Her second book, a young adult novel called The Chaperone , is forthcoming from Roaring Brook Press. She studied writing at The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has been published in the New York Times . What's The Most Meaningful Gift Your Mom Gave You? Editor Elizabeth Benedict received this embroidered, black wool scarf from her mother. It was the last gift she got from her mom before she died. Mother's Day is this Sunday. While some people are racking their brains to think of the perfect way to show their love and appreciation for Mom, a group of distinguished women recently flipped that script and wrote about the most profound gift their own moms gave to them. Their essays are collected in the new book What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most. The book springs out of editor Elizabeth Benedict's personal experience. The last gift she received from her mother was a black wool scarf, embroidered at each end with yellow, pink and blue flowers. "She bought it at the assisted-living facility where she lived. And as soon as I began wearing it, people started commenting on how beautiful it was," Benedict tells Tell Me More host Michel Martin. "And after she died, I wore it all the time in the winter. And I was literally confused by how I could feel this attachment to the scarf and having felt so much distance from my mother." Benedict went on to wonder about the experiences of other women, such as activist and MacArthur "Genius" Cecilia Muñoz. "I lost my mom about five years ago, and it felt like a wonderful opportunity not just to pay tribute to her, but also to reflect on what she gave to me, what she gave to us," says Muñoz. "In my case, I come from one of those big sprawling immigrant families and my mother was very much at the center of it." Muñoz is the daughter of Bolivian immigrants. Her parents married in 1950, and they planned to stay in the United States for just one year so her father could finish his engineering education. But when they decided to return home, their families told them to wait because of a poor economy and political situation. Muñoz received a wok from her mother, whose relationships with everyone in the family largely related to food. She was a homemaker and accomplished chef. She even sold cosmetics. "It's funny because we didn't see her as a working woman at the time because this is like one of those companies where you do makeup parties, essentially. She was terrific at it, but she designed it so she could also be there to take me to music lessons and take my brothers to debate practice, and you know, be a traditional mom in the same way she managed to do all of that," Muñoz says. Now that the activist is juggling an intense job and kids of her own, she understands why her mother was washing the kitchen floor at 11 p.m. or doing laundry at 6 a.m. Muñoz does the same thing, she says. The book includes many other diverse voices, like television host and minister Lillian Daniel, former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, Slate 's Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick, best-selling novelist Lisa See, and even NPR founding mother Susan Stamberg. Benedict says she wanted a real range of experiences so the book would feel like the actual world we live in. "I started with the idea that I wanted people to write about an object. And if I had said to all these people, 'Write me a story about your mother,' I think I wouldn't have gotten anything because people would've freaked out," Benedict says. "But I think being able to focus on one object and tell the sort of beginning and middle and end of that object and how it radiates and reverberates really allows people to get to the core of the relationship." The objects are not diamond rings, fancy cars or houses. They're modest: a photograph, quilt, cake pan, plant, bottle of nail polish, even a cracked vase. "These are not gifts that have a lot of financial value, but the value of the gifts accrues over time," Benedict says. "The value comes from the relationships themselves, and how people process the relationships, and how people move through their lives with their mothers in life and in memory." What My Mother Gave Me. “A single gift can easily tell the story of an entire life,” writes Elizabeth Benedict, editor of and contributor to the anthology What My Mother Gave Me . In the book’s case, a single gift has the ability to tell the story of two lives: mother and daughter. Here, thirty-one women writers spanning five generations essay their way into the stories of their relationships with their mothers, with a particular present serving as the writer’s muse. The impressive lineup of novelists, poets, columnists, journalists, and essayists includes both a National Book Award and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, a US poet laureate, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic, a television producer, and a civil rights activist. The essays exhibit varying degrees of nostalgia, grief (most of the mothers having died by the time of the writing), celebration, and revelation; together they underscore the complexity of relationships—no mother is all good or all bad , neither angelic nor beyond the possibility of redemption, either in life or in a daughter’s reconstructed interpretation. The gifts vetted for significance are varying and oftentimes mundane but serve as portals into personal histories: a boat tour, a wok, an old cake pan, a drawing, a plant, a scarf, a book, a necklace, a smiling Buddha figurine. While every female reader will no doubt hear the notes of her own story played somewhere in the anthology—no matter whether her mother died young, was devoted, withdrawn, alcoholic, highly religious, or a fashionable socialite—the best essays tap into our culture’s shared ideals for what a mother should bequeath to her daughter. In this vein, Jean Hannff Korelitz’s mother, as represented in “My Disquieting Muse,” disrupted her daughter’s unhealthy identification with Sylvia Plath by way of an inscription in one of Plath’s books. Consequently, Korelitz realized she had “inherited endless possibilities” and that she, a feminist, was not obliged to the self-same suffering Plath endured. In “White Christmas,” with the rejection of a Christmas pantsuit, Ann Hood’s mother gave her the gift of permission to “become that person [she’d] dreamed of becoming: a girl who spoke her mind, who was independent and opinionated.” What My Mother Gave Me shines where it displays the stuff a forward-thinking society wants its women to bequeath and to inherit: lessons about identity, personhood, equality, respect, and—as Joyce Carol Oates penned in “The Quilt”—the knowledge “that love endures in the most elemental and comforting of ways.” Reviewed by Heather Weber Spring 2013. Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255. The Plant Whisperer. My mother, born of Iraqi Jews who had migrated to India, married a Canadian who brought her home to a glass house in Ottawa.

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