Moving back and forth between experience and language, The Unspeakable Mother operates out of the intersection of two perspectives: women's immersion in the mother/daughter dyad and the paradoxical absence of the mother in the daughter's discourse. Deborah Kelly Kloepfer calls attention to the repeated allusions to dead mothers, dying mothers, mad mothers, stepmothers, abortions, stillbirths, miscarriages, and infant death in the novels of Jean Rhys and the poems and prose of H.D. Drawing on American and French feminist theory, she suggests that Rhys, H.D., and other modernist women writers, rather than just characterizing women's experience, are encoding the mother in relation to language. The dead mother is a trope for textlessness, a trope that also serves to inscribe the repression of the female speaking/writing subject. Challenging a number of assumptions of critical discourse, in which the father traditionally functions as the guardian of the symbolic, Kloepfer shows how thematic violence toward the female body is accompanied by the rupturing of conventional language, an act that both reconstitutes the abandoned mother and turns the violence against the androcentric discourse that has denied her. In the work of both Rhys and H.D., Kloepfer uncovers a startling and unsettling incestuous language between mother and daughter which relies not only on the unspoken but on the unspeakable. Anyone interested in literary modernism will find The Unspeakable Mother fascinating reading, as will students and scholars in the fields of psychoanalytic criticism and feminist theory.

A master of the personal essay candidly explores love, death, and the counterfeit rituals of American life in this "brave, funny compendium" (Slate) Nearly fifteen years after her debut collection, My Misspent Youth, captured the ambitions and anxieties of a generation, Meghan Daum returns to the personal essay with The Unspeakable, a powerful collection of ten new works. Where her previous collection explores what it is to be a struggling twenty-something urban dweller with an overdrawn bank account and oversized ambition, The Unspeakable contends with parental death, the decision not to have children, and more-a new set of challenges tackled by a writer at her best, investigated in the same uncompromising voice that made Daum one of the most engaging thinkers writing today. In The Unspeakable, Daum pushes back against the false sentimentality and shrink-wrapped platitudes that surround so much of the contemporary American experience. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the New Age search for the "Best Possible Experience," champions the merits of cream-of-mushroom-soup casserole, and gleefully recounts a quintessential "only-in-L.A." story of playing charades at a famous person's home. Combining the piercing insight of Joan Didion with humor reminiscent of Nora Ephron's, Daum dissects our culture's most dangerous illusions while retaining her own joy and compassion. Through it all, she dramatizes the search for an authentic self in a world where achieving an identity is never simple and never complete.

In this bold rereading of Freud's cultural texts, Diane Jonte-Pace uncovers an undeveloped "counterthesis," one that repeatedly interrupts or subverts his well-known Oedipal masterplot. The counterthesis is evident in three clusters of themes within Freud's work: maternity, mortality, and immortality; Judaism and anti-Semitism; and mourning and melancholia. Each of these clusters is associated with "the uncanny" and with death and loss. Appearing most frequently in Freud's images, metaphors, and illustrations, the counterthesis is no less present for being unspoken--it is, indeed, "unspeakable." The "uncanny mother" is a primary theme found in Freud's texts involving fantasies of immortality and mothers as instructors in death. In other texts, Jonte-Pace finds a story of Jews for whom the dangers of assimilation to a dominant Gentile culture are associated unconsciously with death and the uncanny mother. The counterthesis appears in the story of anti-Semites for whom the "uncanny impression of circumcision" gives rise not only to castration anxiety but also to matriphobia. It also surfaces in Freud's ability to mourn the social and religious losses accompanying modernity, and his inability to mourn the loss of his own mother. The unfolding of Freud's counterthesis points toward a theory of the cultural and unconscious sources of misogyny and anti-Semitism in "the unspeakable." Jonte-Pace's work opens exciting new vistas for the feminist analysis of Freud's intellectual legacy.

The War That Saved My Life meets Coraline in this “deliciously creepy” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) middle grade historical novel following an anxious young girl learning to face her fears—and her ghosts—against the backdrop of the typhoid epidemic. Essie O’Neill is afraid of everything. She’s afraid of cats and electric lights. She’s afraid of the silver sick bell, a family heirloom that brings up frightening memories. Most of all, she’s afraid of the red door in her nightmares. But soon Essie discovers so much more to fear. Her mother has remarried, and they must move from their dilapidated tenement in the Bronx to North Brother Island, a dreary place in the East River. That’s where Essie’s new stepfather runs a quarantine hospital for the incurable sick, including the infamous Typhoid Mary. Essie knows the island is plagued with tragedy. Years ago, she watched in horror as the ship General Slocum caught fire and sank near its shores, plummeting one thousand women and children to their deaths. Now, something on the island is haunting Essie. And the red door from her dreams has become a reality, just down the hall from her bedroom in her terrifying new house. Convinced her stepfather is up to no good, Essie investigates. Yet to uncover the truth, she will have to face her own painful history—and what lies behind the red door.

The cult classic essay collection from “one of the most emotionally exacting, mercilessly candid, deeply funny . . . writers of our time” (Cheryl Strayed, The New York Times Book Review). First published in 2001, My Misspent Youthcaptured a generation’s uneasy coming of age as the world made its chaotic way into a new millennium. It also established Meghan Daum as a leading literary voice, widely celebrated for her fresh, provocative approach to the hidden fault lines of America’s cultural landscape. From her New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the ethereal, strangely old-fashioned allure of cyber-relationships to her dazzlingly hilarious riff about musical passions that give way to middle-brow paraphernalia, Daum delves into the center of things while closely examining the detritus that spills out along the way. With precision and well-balanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.

Sheila Tofield tells her moving true story about being a single mother in 1950s Britain, in The Unmarried Mother. 'A searing, honest testimony' Lesley Pearse Sheila grew up in Rotherham, the daughter of an uncaring mother who made her believe she was useless, stupid and - most painfully of all - unlovable. As a young woman, her worst childhood fears were confirmed when her fiancé broke off their engagement without an explanation. Heartbroken and vulnerable, Sheila was easy prey to the worst type of man - a man who turned his back on her when she told him she was carrying his child. In Fifties Britain, an unmarried, pregnant girl received,not sympathy but censure and contempt. Shunned by most of her family, Sheila ended up in a Church of England home for unmarried mothers, with no apparent alternative than to give up her child for adoption. But when she held her newborn daughter in her arms for the first time, Sheila knew she had to do the unthinkable: bring up her baby on her own in a society that would condemn her for it. Sheila Tofield is a proud grandmother living in Chichester and The Unmarried Mother is her first book. Her touching story was picked up by Penguin when she entered the hugely successful life story competition with Saga Magazine.

An eloquent, heartfelt account of a young boy's fight with cancer and of a mother's determination and resilience, which see their family through to his recovery. As her ten-year-old son sits at the kitchen table one evening, Lise Marzouk inspects his mouth and discovers an unusual growth, which doctors later confirm is cancerous. When he is hospitalized at the Curie Institute in Paris for lymphoma treatment, Lise finds herself torn between two worlds, one at his bedside, and the other at home with her two younger children, struggling to maintain a sense of stability in their lives. And so she writes—of their fears and doubts, but also of their moments of tenderness and joy—and through these memories, stories, and reveries, she arrives at a deeper understanding of herself as a woman, a mother, and a writer. Brimming with a rebellious sense of hope, If offers an intimate look at how a mother's love and support enabled her family to come out of a devastating experience stronger and more connected.

A guide to hope and healing after the death of a child, from a grief counselor and psychotherapist who has been there. Nisha Zenoff lost her son in a tragic accident when he was just seventeen years old. Now, with decades of experience as a grief counselor and psychotherapist, she offers support and guidance from her own journey and from others who have experienced the death of a child. The Unspeakable Loss helps those who mourn to face the urgent questions that accompany loss: "Will my tears ever stop?" "Who am I now without my child?" "How can I help my other children cope?" "I lost my only child, how do I live?" "Will my marriage survive?" "Will life ever feel worth living again?" No matter where you are in your grieving process, The Unspeakable Loss provides a space to mourn in your own way, and helps you understand how the death of a child affects siblings, other family members and friends, recognizing that we each grieve differently. And while there is no one prescription for healing, Zenoff provides tools to practice the important aspects of grieving that are easily forgotten -- self-compassion and self-care. The Unspeakable Loss doesn't flinch from the reality or pain caused by the death of a child, yet ultimately it is a book about the choice to embrace life, love, and joy again. As Zenoff writes in the Preface: "Our relationships with our children do not end with their deaths. Our relationships change, they're transformed, but our children will always be with us."

Now in paperback, the provocative book that has ignited fiery debate and created a dialogue among women about the state of motherhood today. In THE MOMMY MYTH, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels turn their 'sharp, funny, and fed-up prose' (San Diego Union Tribune) toward the cult of the new momism, a trend in Western culture that suggests that women can only achieve contentment through the perfection of mothering. Even so, the standards of this ideal remain out of reach, no matter how hard women try to 'have it all'. THE MOMMY MYTH skilfully maps the distance travelled from the days when THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE demanded more for women than keeping house and raising children, to today's not-so-subtle pressure to reverse this trend. A must-read for every woman.

Mother at Seven is the shocking, inspirational true story of a little girl's tragic childhood, and how she endured and overcame a decade of unspeakable abuse at the hands of her cruel and sadistic family. Set in Sochi, Russia, near the banks of the majestic Black Sea, Mother at Seven tells of those critical moments in a child's life when the only thing standing between the life and death itself was a pure and innocent belief that better days lie ahead. It teaches that by fighting through hardship and pain, miracles can still happen, and that life can still be amazing as long as hope is never lost.