First published 1982
Maud Dowd sits across from her daughter Elizabeth, both women carrying the weight of unspoken truths. Their family history stretches between them like a bridge built on shifting ground. Elizabeth sees her mother through the lens of childhood fantasies that no longer fit the woman before her. Maud carries her own distorted memories of what their family once was or might have been. Both women struggle to separate what actually happened from what they wished had happened. Tragedy has touched their lives, leaving them to piece together fragments of understanding. The past refuses to stay buried, surfacing in conversations that reveal how differently they remember the same events. Each woman searches for solid ground in a landscape of family myths and personal misconceptions. Their relationship becomes a mirror reflecting back all the ways people can misunderstand those closest to them. At its heart, this is a story about the gap between who we are and who others believe us to be.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
175 pages · Hardcover · Little, Brown & Company