“The author is masterful at showing the fluid state of mothering in all its kaleidoscopic dimensions—the highs and lows, the angry moments counterbalancing affection, and the depths to which some will go to ‘protect’ loved ones. This exceptional, riveting novel will haunt you long after you’ve reached the end.” —Rocky Mountain News
“Outstanding . . . A haunting eyes-wide openness.” —Daily Candy
“A captivating thriller.” —More magazine
“How could a mother kill her children? This breathtaking first novel from photojournalist Kogan attempts a heart-wrenching answer . . . [An] unflinching portrait of filicide, which still manages to find light in the darkness of a very disturbing subject.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Breathtaking . . . Heart-wrenching.” —The Baltimore Examiner
“Startling revelations . . . Chillingly told.” —Birmingham Magazine
“A bold, haunting, honest, and wholly original journey into the darker, unchronicled terrains of motherhood.” —Katie Roiphe, author of Still She Haunts Me
“Bracingly honest and poignant, Between Here and April is a novel I will read again and again. It’s that good.” —Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
“Deborah Copaken Kogan has written a haunting work of ambition and dimension. Vivid and lively, disturbing and funny all at once, it captures not just one era but two, taking a keen look at the strictures and innocence of 1970s suburbia and the freedoms and pressures of present-day urban family life. This is a big, rich novel that tackles the ambivalence of motherhood full-frontally.” —Meg Wolitzer, author of The Position
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2008 by Deborah Copaken Kogan.
All rights reserved.
While April Cassidy is based on an actual person once known to the author, and the basic building blocks of her fate (the who, what, where, when, and how) are largely pilfered from real life, the mortar of this tale—the why—is purely a figment of the author’s imagination.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE
E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-021-3
As part of our celebration of Mother's Day, we hope you enjoy this special preview of our latest anthology,
WHAT MY MOTHER GAVE ME,
edited by Elizabeth Benedict.
AVAILABLE WHEREVER
BOOKS ARE SOLD
Introduction
It is said that all books begin with an obsession, and this one is no exception.
In this case, it’s a beautiful winter scarf my mother gave me toward the end of her life, probably the last gift I got from her. After she died in 2004, I became more attached to it. The times I thought I’d lost it, I went into full-blown panics. It was only partly that I didn’t know where to find a replacement for this embroidered wool scarf whose label said MADE IN INDIA. Mostly, it was feeling that I’d lost my connection to my mother—a connection that was restored as soon as I found it.
The intensity of my feelings about the scarf surprised me, because I had felt so distant from my mother for most of my life. But because she was kind, loving, and needy, my feelings for her were layered with guilt, and the guilt so thick it sometimes felt like torment. After she died, I just felt sad and intensely aware of the scarf, which I wear around the collar of my coat all winter long, every year.
I lived silently with this welter of feelings year after year. I didn’t know whom to talk to about it, or what to say; the scarf was attached to a free-floating, inchoate grief. Or was it something other than grief? For years, the feelings were beyond any words that I could summon. In 2011, my brooding gave way to curiosity, and I began to wonder about the experience of other women. If this one gift meant so much to me, if it unlocked the door to so much history and such complicated feelings, might other women have such a gift themselves?
What My Mother Gave Me is the affirmative answer to that question. Each of the contributors describes a gift from her mother—three-dimensional, experiential, a work habit, a habit of being, a way of seeing the world—that magically, movingly reveals the story of her mother and of their relationship. The pieces run from short and sweet to long and wrenching, from hilarious to mournful, from heartwarming to heartbreaking. And the treasured gifts shimmer in their variety and uniqueness: an etiquette book, a plant, a necklace, a horse, a passport, a trip on the Circle Line boat around Manhattan. One woman received from her writer mother the habits of writing a thousand words a day plus one charming note. Another got the gift of taking the impossible in stride. And one was given a few bottles of nail polish that changed her life.
Singly, each piece is a gem to me: a gathering in of memory, affection, and gratitude, however tormented the relationships once were. Taken together, the pieces have a force that feels as elemental as the tides: outpourings of lightness and darkness; simple joy and devastating grief; mother love and daughter love; mother love and daughter rage; the anguish of suffering mothers and daughters powerless to help them—and the spoken and unspoken weight of missing all the mothers who are gone.
Having had an unhappy mother, I found myself astonished—feeling a mixture of envy and disbelief—by the stories of happy mothers and daughters. At first, I thought it was the younger writers whose mothers were happy, those whose mothers had more control over their lives and their finances than women of my mother’s generation. But as essays arrived over a period of months, I saw I was wrong: there are happy mothers from all generations in this collection. Such mothers—it’s clear from these pages—raise more lighthearted offspring than unhappy ones; or do I mean only that the absence of torment is palpable in their pages?
As essay after essay reveals, a single gift can easily tell the story of an entire life. Yet for all the richness here, it’s striking how modest almost all of these gifts are. A used cake pan, a homemade quilt, a wok, a Mexican blouse, a family photograph. It just might be, after all, that it’s the thought that counts—and the packaging, too. I don’t mean the paper and the ribbons, but the emotional wrapping, the occasion for the gift, the spirit in which it was given, and everything that happened before and after. This is another way of saying that, as gift givers and recipients—whether we are mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, or cherished friends—we may not know for quite some time which presents will matter most.
From What My Mother Gave Me edited by Elizabeth Benedict. Copyright (c) 2013 by Elizabeth Benedict. All rights reserved.
Between Here and April Page 26
