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My Mother’s Daughter

by Rona Maynard

Rona Maynard has deep roots in the worlds of art and storytelling. She was the editor of Chatelaine for 10 years. Before that, she worked at Maclean’s under Peter C. Newman. Her mother, Fredelle Maynard, was an author and English scholar before women could really make a go of it in academia. Her father was a professor who’d painted with Emily Carr on the West Coast before heading east. Her younger sister, Joyce, is a writer who lived with J.D. Salinger for a period in her youth (as she notoriously chronicled in her memoir At Home in the World). All of these people make appearances in Maynard’s memoir, My Mother’s Daughter.

Maynard hasn’t written this memoir from behind the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia. Every character who makes an appearance in her memoir is a fully sketched human, the flaws no less visible than the positive attributes. She doesn’t shy away from portraying honest family difficulties. One particularly brutal scene comes early on in the book, when Max, Maynard’s alcoholic father, is mocked by her mother for regularly missing the toilet on his drunken bathroom visits. The author paints the scene in humiliating and emasculating strokes, but Fredelle emerges no less fully realized than her husband.

The narrative is roughly chronological, but Maynard’s chapters are by no means bound to the linear progression of time. Moments of flashback and reminiscence branch off the main narrative at all points, mimicking the organic flow of life. On occasion, the transitions between sections in chapters are abrupt, and the occasional narrative thread dropped at the beginning of a chapter fails to get picked up again, but these inconveniences are minor.

Maynard writes honestly and unselfconsciously, without coming off as malicious. No, the people who have had an impact on her life are not perfect, but My Mother’s Daughter stands as a firm testament to the fact that they were still valued, and deservedly so.

 

Reviewer: Cassandra Drudi

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $34

Page Count: 260 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-7710-5701-4

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2007-10

Categories: Memoir & Biography