Intergenerational Conflicts: A Guest Post by Susan Rieger
Our Book Club pick is a story of mothers and daughters and complex family mythologies where inheritance doesn’t always mean wealth. Read on for an exclusive guest post from Susan Rieger on why she wanted to write about intergenerational conflicts, family dynamics and more.
Hardcover
$26.00
$29.00
Like Mother, Like Mother (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
Like Mother, Like Mother (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
By Susan Rieger
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$26.00
$29.00
An enthralling novel about three generations of strong-willed women, unknowingly shaped by the secrets buried in their family’s past.
An enthralling novel about three generations of strong-willed women, unknowingly shaped by the secrets buried in their family’s past.
This is my third book about families and their intergenerational conflicts. I like the swing of three generations and I’ve been all three: the nonna, the mombo, and the daughter. None of the characters are me, except—in places—the youngest, Grace, who carries childhood grievances against her absentee, workaholic mother, Lila, well into her twenties.
My mother has been dead 20 years and rarely a day goes by that I don’t think of her. I’ve given up the wish that she had been different (mostly) and have come to think of her more as a person than a mother. This is not entirely a workaround; she was a spectacular person and that is a major compensation for her maternal defects. I could quote her all day: Marry the man who makes you laugh, they all make you cry. I’m a better mother than my mother and my daughter is a much, much better mother than I, and yet I believe my mother and I did the best we could even though it wasn’t always the best. To a large extent this is what Like Mother, Like Mother is about: a daughter can improve upon her mother, she can’t overthrow her.
The heart of the book is Lila, the executive editor of a D.C. newspaper, and a woman who readily admits she knows nothing of mothering. Her approach is like the Hippocratic Oath: First, do not harm. Her own mother disappeared when she was 2 and she solved the problem of raising a family by marrying a man who is a wonderful father, one for the Guinness Book of Fathers. The pulse of the story is her youngest daughter Grace who, at 30, publicly exposes Lila’s neglect, an act which does nothing to assuage her resentments but thoughtlessly hurts people she loves. Will Grace ever conquer her hurt? I’m cheering for her. There are many other people in the book. I surround Lila and Grace, with family, friends, mentors, lovers, spouses, enemies, colleagues. I make a point of the last. Work has an important place in this novel and in the lives of the women in it. Marriage, too, is put under the microscope, along with flings and love affairs. And friendships, too.
My granddaughter Eliza, 18, just started at Amherst College. The book is dedicated to her and my two grandsons. I sent her an ARC, and she read it this summer on a three-generational family holiday on Cape Cod. Halfway through, she said she was “obsessed by the book.” When she finished, she said she was “so proud of me.” My heart exploded. I do not love my granddaughter more than my children but she and her cousins are the easiest loves of my life. Lila doesn’t live to meet grandchildren. (Not a spoiler, she dies in the first sentence of the book.) I wonder what kind of granny she would make. Now there’s a question that could stop you in your tracks. I am a late-in-life novelist, I published my first novel when I was 67. Ten years on, I’m publishing my third. I started writing the first, shortly after my mother died. It seems I needed to bury her body before I could bury her failings and celebrate her gifts.