Helpful Score: 9
I get it, her mother was a druggie, inappropriate, and unstable. Does that explain the author's decision to live recklessly? It was hard to have sympathy for her, as everything comes back to her mother, and Susanna seems to take little responsibility for her own choices. The book reads as a litany of one-night stands and poor choices, with very little growth or self exploration.
Helpful Score: 7
This book was like a train wreck- pretty awful but you couldn't look away. It's not often that I can say that I don't enjoy reading something, but I wasn't a fan of this book. I only finished it because I started it and hoped that it would get better. Essentially the premise is Sonnenberg describing how her mother messed her up by being a sex addict, druggie, and liar. The beginning of this book was very disjointed, I don't know if it's because Sonnenberg is recalling her earliest childhood memories and those are often disjointed themselves, but it made it difficult to connect with what was going on. Things become less "jumpy" and seem to be in a more coherent order as Sonnenberg goes into later childhood and teenage memories, but it seems to me to be more of a "here's a list of increasingly crazy things I or my mother did" type thing. Sonnenberg seems to be going for "shock value." I could almost see this train of thought- "What will shock readers more, telling them about how my mother gave me my first crack, my mother's list of famous sex partners (no names though), my first threesome, etc...I know, I'll thrown in all of it." It just seems too "out there" for everything to be true. I understand that the point of her tale is to explain why she feels love & connection for a mother who seriously messed her up and how as an adult she feels she can't go to her mother's deathbed because she knows she needs to cut her mother out of her life in order to lead a normal existence, but she really doesn't touch on that except superficially. I'm also curious about why DYFS or some other protective service was never brought in. It seemed to be out in the open that her mother was messed up & all the adults in Sonnenberg's life were aware of this fact. All in all, this book wasn't what I expected it to be.
Helpful Score: 5
Very disturbing memoir of conflict between a mother-daughter relationship....love vs. insanity. The author minces no words. If you like reading about dysfunctional families, you will enjoy this.
Helpful Score: 4
I really thought this was a great book. I thought her writing style flowed very easily. A great memoir about a crazy mother and the affects she had on her two girls and others in her life. If you enjoy memoirs I think you will enjoy reading this book!
Helpful Score: 3
I was not a huge fan of this book, perhaps i did not feel that the mother was the monster her daughter wanted the reader to think she was. i just did not sympathize with any of the people and felt the need to complete the book only because i had started to read it.
