Finished the memoir but not with pleasure

 Shadow Daughter:
A Memoir of Estrangement

by Harriet Brown

This isn't a memoir.  It's a mixed up hodgepodge of bits and pieces of the author's and other people's experiences with estrangement, In her case, it's a mother; in other people's, family members of all sorts.

I got more than half-way through and I didn't even have a feeling for what it was like growing up with a mother who perpetually insults, embarrasses, and fails to support her daughter. It was just so scatterbrained a "memoir" that I didn't even have a good sense of the timeline involved. As far as I could tell, the author didn't even try to seek out other family members and write down their memories of the abuse. She hints at this, but doesn't do it.

When I realized it wasn't going to be a memoir, I assumed that she was going to tell other people's stories about their own family issues. And so she does--in a disorganized, rattle-on kind of way. Some of the stories take up as much as three or four paragraphs...and then just drop off or jump back to the author's own experience. I'd just be getting interested in a person, and she'd drop 'em.

She alludes to a few statistics and studies, but in general, it's a shallow and self-centered approach to the subject. If it really were a memoir, that would be expected. But it's not.