The Bad Daughter

Rating:
Summary: Too much information
Review: Hilden has written a fantastic memoir. It is simultaneously touching and thought-provoking. Rather than whitewashing the pain and anguish that mental degeneration can impose on a family, Hilden confronts these issues squarely. The result is that you are left with a much more complex understanding of the issues involved and a broader sense of sympathy for the difficulty posed by any particular choice about how to deal with mental degenaration and death. The story itself is touching and moving, as another Amazon reviewer said, "an emotional tour-de-force." And it puts abstract medical ethics issues, like genetic screening, in a very human and very complex framework.

Bravo!

Rating:
Summary: Truly a bad daughter
Review: I purchased this book because I thought I would find solace in the story of another young girl who had a difficult time with her mother, and suffered throughout life with the emotions attached to that. Instead I found Ms. Hilden's style and attitude more akin to a law brief than a memoir of a painful time in her life. She is cold and emotionless and does not draw the reader into the story, except to dislike the daughter. Believe me, I wanted to like this book. I wanted to believe Ms. Hilden when she said her mother hurt her. I wanted to feel her justification for abandoning her mother as she lay dying, but the book simply did not do that. This woman may have every ivy league degree in the world and certainly sounds couragious in overcoming poverty, but it seems she either has never learned to feel emotion or never learned to put it on paper so the reader can feel it too.

Rating:
Summary: Uninsightful and Self-Serving
Review: I was looking forward to reading this book because I, too, feel like a "bad daughter;" I feel that I didn't do enough to help my alcoholic mother. Also, like Ms. Hilden, I am an attorney. I found, however, that Ms. Hilden offered no insight into WHY she acted as she did--she simply used her feelings of unworthiness as an excuse to behave badly.

Rating:
Summary: Typical, not bad just typical
Review: I've met a lot of Yale Law grad students over the years. Believe it or not, Hilden seems to be probably middle ground in terms of charm and empathy. You should enjoy some quality time with the truly bad sons and daughters of Eli.

Moderately intersting book, good for the "writing as therapy" set and those looking for another turn on the Confessions motif available from Augustine to Rousseau down to the self help shelves. Hilden's is better written than the self help books, but not much deeper. If you like this kind of book, you'll like this one.

If you don't like this kind of book, I suggest you spend your ducets on the natural opposite of The Bad Daughter. Check out The Good Son by Nick Cave. More interesting and insightful by multiples, and you get to tap your foot.

Rating:
Summary: Pretentious, boring...
Review: Julie Hilden blew me away with her novel called Three. It was one of the darkest, most thought provoking erotic novels I have read in a long time. And for that reason, I decided to give her memoir a whirl. Bad Daughter is pretentious in more ways than one. Julie talks about her painful childhood as she watched her mother hit rock bottom with her alcoholism. Her mother now has Alzheimer and is unable to take care of herself. Julie decides not to look after her mother and chooses to go to law school instead. What transpires is a long take of her childhood and self-torture for the decisions she has made.

This memoir is pretentious because it tries to be philosophical and analytical about almost everything. The author should have limited things to just telling the reader about her childhood and the dilemmas she's faced as an adult. There are so many memoirs out there about alcoholic parents and family members with Alzheimer that one more makes no difference. Hilden wanted to come across as a careless, apathetic daughter trying to justify her decision to not look after her ill mother, and it got tiring after a while. There is nothing in this memoir that makes it standout. Reading Bad Daughter caused me to yawn more times than any other bad book I have recently read.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books written
Review: Julie Hilden has written an amazing book, a book filled with depth and passion. She speaks about the difficult choices she had to face in dealing with the pressures of an incredibly painful family life, coupled with law school demands and those of simply growing up.

The Bad Daughter is an honest book -- one that drives the reader to question his or her own character while reading the book, and to ask whether or not the feelings one has as the words pour across the page are derived from empathy, scorn, or a desire to hide one's own similarities to Ms. Hilden. It is written in such a beautiful style, with so many moving episodes, that it will stay with you, forever.

Rating:
Summary: Too much information
Review: Ms. Hilden writes this book to cure her own demons and appease her own guilt. She is brave to write it, but inconsiderate to the reader as some details go too far. While she titles the book 'the bad daughter' she never owns up to her own responsibility.

I think she was a daughter who did the best she could. I wish she would write a sequel in which she forgives herself. This book made be glad I did not know the author. I hope writing is has helped her find solace.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful and courageous memoir
Review: There are some virulently negative reviews of this book posted here. It's really rather extraordinary. It certainly confirms Hilden's own statement that this is a "taboo" book, that it is not a book with a satisfying resolution of release and forgiveness. Instead, it is a most unhappy tale that is still in progress. That someone could write a memoir like this so young and convey so much pain so succintly is its own denouncement of those who have apparently drawn some half-baked conclusions about Hilden's personality. My guess is that many nay-sayers did not bother to finish the book, and ought to consider more carefully Hilden's reflections on the possibility of Alzeihmers hanging over her like Damocles' sword.

Through an almost clinical relay of her life, she shows for us the detachment she uses to describe her as a child. It does not make for easy reading, but you can only mourn for her soul as she relays the trite and malformed relationships she has had with men. It was telling that over a hundred pages of the book went by with no mention of her father. Even in her most dry and pitiless prose one can sense the incessant pain of her life. So often pain is the root source of obsession; that it often results in success --and Hilden is obviously an extremely gifted attorney-- certainly cannot obscure the root pain in her life. Applaud her for this brave expiation; I could at times feel her tears in her writing, it must have been so painful to write this. A tremendous little book; I read it in one sitting.

Rating:
Summary: Best memoir I have read in a long time.
Review: Very well written. I agree fully with reviewer Daniel Kuhn. Great depth in self - analysis and writing style. But leaves me wondering if she would still react the way she did, were she to relive those days. Does she repent? - I cannot say. I appreciate her honesty, - read only if you can stomach stark honesty!