Tangled Lives

Daughters, Mothers and the Crucible of Aging

By: Lillian Rubin

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Paperback | 5 October 2001

At a Glance

Paperback
224 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
0.1 x 0.1 x 0.1

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This text examines the lives of women as they grow from daughters into mothers and move on into the intimidating territory of old age. The book uses pivotal events from the author's own life - her mother's passing, her own dramatic brush with death, her daughter's illness and her 75th birthday - to illuminate the powerful influence the mother-daughter bond has on a woman's identity and the profound changes that come with ageing. Interweaving her present challenges with the story of her immigrant Jewish family's struggle, Dr Rubin offers us a map to understanding. Her mother's death gives occasion to reflect on her life's path: her father's sudden death when she was five, her mother's grueling labour in the New York garment industry before unions made the work barely tolerable, and her own climb from poverty. As she lies in a hospital bed recovering from a nearly fatal blood clot, she recounts triumphantly how, in defiance of her own troubled history with her mother, she forged a deep and meaningful relationship with her daughter.

Industry Reviews

For baby-boomer women, Tangled Lives is a particular gift, offering rare insight into the lives of our mothers, their mothers, and, through that process, into our own. -Peggy Orenstein, author of Schoolgirls and Flux "This frank remembrance of a long life by a celebrated writer and therapist yields a tale rich in insights-about immigrant poverty and shame, about language and ambition, about complicated family feeling, and most wisely about growing old." -Alix Kates Shulman, author of A Good Enough Daughter and Drinking the Rain

"Looking backward and forward in life, Lillian Rubin has written a riveting, poignant, and insightful book that will make you laugh and weep at the same time." -Arlie Hochschild, author of The Second Shift and The Time Bind

"With unflinching candor and remarkable narrative grace, Tangled Lives untangles the knotty mess of fear, vulnerability, shame, and resistance that accompanies the aging process. Lillian Rubin's journal precisely and unsentimentally describes the countdown to her seventy-fifth birthday, her 'coming out' as an old woman in this youth obsessed culture, the power of love in her life, and the mother-daughter drama that found resolution in the shadow of her own mortality. A riveting, must-read memoir." -Letty Cottin Pogrebin, author of Getting Over Getting Older

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