The Middle of Everything: Memoirs of Motherhood

There's so much in this book that should be thought & talked about that I've put it on my book group's list for this winter--we're a bunch of new or new-ish mothers and usually we DON'T read motherhood books or parenting books because the point of our reading group is to take a BREAK from thinking about being moms. But this book raises so many important issues, I think we have to break our own "rule." And it doesn't JUST talk about parenting issues, either. It also talks about what it means to be a girl and a woman in our world without, what friendship is FOR, and what it feels like to go through menopause--its like a one-volume encyclopedia of femaleness. Plus Herman writes about the one huge issue all new mothers have to deal with, which is how do you know what the right thing to do IS? She doesn't have answers but she asks all the right questions. As a mom of a bright and kind of challenging 4-yr old, I found every page interesting (and I am going to lend MY copy to my mom). My only complaint is that its kind of expensive. Wish it were in paperback!

Not since Anne Lamott's "Operating Instructions" have I felt so...connected to a fellow mother - and the mother part doesn't even really get rolling till the final part of the book! I loved reading about Michelle's process of 'getting there'... all the relationships we form, for better or for worse; the friends we make and lose; the loneliness and love... all that stuff we go through as women before we enter the most challenging relationship of all - that we have with our children. Thank you Michelle for baring your soul - I feel like I've found a friend.

I just read this book and I feel like I have to point out that (for me, anyway) what was great about it WASN'T the whole mother-daughter thing that the publisher and the reviews I've read concentrate on. There's stuff in this book about friendship, about BEST FRIENDS, that I've never read anywhere else. No one talks about this! I felt this jolt, like, FINALLY! My best friends have been my mainstay since I was little (and I'm 38 now!). I love my husband, I love my son, but it's my best friend Joanna and my second-best friends (they won't mind being called that, I'm their second or maybe even third-best friend too) who keep me sane. (I also think that Herman says some things about motherhood in general, in the last part of the book, that needed to be said and that NOBODY EVER HAS. Read it! I should be ashamed to say that I didn't buy it, I got it from my library, but I just ordered a copy for Joanna!)

Extraordinary, highly recommended, poignant, powerful, entertaining, insightful, playful and profound. May provoke laughter and tears. An amazing frank, disarming and charming collection of essays on daughterhood, motherhood, adolescence, the artist as a middle-aged mother, romance, puppy love, the Beatles, need and want, and on the joys and sorrows, successes and failures, fears and hopes, pleasures and pains of being a mother, a daughter, and a hopelessly idealistic and romantic seeker of perfect love, perfect friendship and perfect communion. Through four interwoven essays spun around the author's relationship with her daughter from womb to eight years old, and the author's own lonely adolescence, a rich tale of yearning and discerning females from Brooklyn to the Midwest casts its spell with amusing anecdotes about growing up, about the phenomenon and need of best friends, about boys (answering her daughter's questions about all her old boyfriends, even the first loves who never knew) and men and pop songs and talking snakes and childhood dreams of stardom. Inspired by the author's all-abiding love and devotion to her daughter, the ultimate irony of this powerful book is revealed in the heart-wrenching episode of the daughter's near breakdown at age 6, when a conflict of needs--the mother's and the daughter's--grows out of the mother's overprotective love and provokes the daughter's crisis of individuation--her social and emotional adaptation to the world beyond her mother's orbit. Thankfully, all ends well, with the daughter gaining her own highly individual selfhood and the mother learning to let go and still support the neverending dream. And the reader learning about the heart in conflict with itself, and the courage it takes to be a parent and to admit faults, to forgive and to find yourself in your darkest fears. A moving tribute to the perils and ultimate power of love. Bravo.

What an extraordinary book this is! Herman, whose expansive, delightful style effortlessly incorporates an array of experience, moves with grace and perfect emotional honesty through this memoir. She analyzes the complexities of female friendships, the hunger for stardom and precariousness of various changes of life with an eye so fresh and discerning that readers may feel as if she is making these subjects anew. The book's final essay, about her daughter's breakdown, is something no reader is likely ever to forget--searing, devastaing, stunning.