Description:
Daughters are a notoriously critical lot, and writers whose task it is to render the dramas of their mother's lives can be doubly so. The 46 contributors to The Source of the Spring remember the women who launched them into the world with affection, exasperation, love, and simmering fury. Writings by such luminaries as Francine du Plessix Gray, Erica Jong, Anna Quindlen, and Ntozake Shange are juxtaposed with snippets of awkward, evocative letters from high-school students whose efforts won a contest sponsored by Barnard College in New York. Though the selections are uneven, the best amaze, wryly amuse, or shake us up. With a bitterness that seems untouched by time, June Jordan unwinds the skein leading to her debilitated mother's suicide, an act that appears to have sprung as much from love as desperation. Several other pieces celebrate a beloved matriarch even as they mourn her loss. After her mother's spirit left her body, says American ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston, "We were all grubby bundles of misery, huddled around lamps." Many contributors take umbrage at old-fashioned advice aimed at shaping the sort of woman who loses sight of herself while making others comfortable. Thank goodness, says Anne Lake Prescott, "I did as my mother did, not as she said." Shrugging off her mother's assurance that one's husband is always right, Anne Bernays passes on a few kernels of far better maternal advice: "Never buy cheap shoes. Always take a sweater along. Don't complain if it hurts. Don't waste your God-given gifts or talents. Practice your art, whatever it might be, until you get as good at it as you can." --Francesca Coltrera
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