Joy enough: a memoir

✍ Scribed by Sarah McColl

• Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 84 KB
• Edition: First edition
• Category: Fiction
• City: New York
• ISBN: 1631494716

✦ Synopsis

"Capturing the fleeting, yet universal, impressions of what it means to be a daughter, [this book] is the life-affirming memoir of a woman making and remaking her life in her mother's image. Writing in prose that hums with humor and grace, brilliant debut author Sarah McColl seeks the answer to a question that has haunted her for years: Can you explain what people mean when they say, You are just like your mother? Through a series of vivid scenes and memories, McColl reveals her late mother, Allison, as a woman of endless charm and infinite love for her unruly brood of red-headed children. When Sarah's own young marriage begins to splinter, Allison is there to attest that there's a lesson in it all, knowing heartbreak firsthand: 'It's not too late to start over ... You don't always have to be a good girl.' But as Sarah comes to grips, Allison is diagnosed with cancer, and she drops everything to return to the family farmhouse to tend to her mother in the best way she knows how--by sweating over elaborate meals in the hopes of nourishing her back to health. Sarah and Allison's intimacy is illuminated in afternoons bent over the vegetable garden, in cherry pits discarded at the bottom of a bowl, in lopsided cakes, and in conversations at the dinner table neither of them can bear to see end. Mining the losses of both her marriage and her beloved mother, McColl boldly confronts her own identity as a woman, walking in the footsteps of the woman who came before her. 'A diamond in book form' (Molly Wizenberg), Joy Enough is a breathtaking account of clinging fast to the joy left behind."--Jacket;McColl seeks the answer to a question that has haunted her for years: Can you explain what people mean when they say, You are just like your mother? Her memories reveal her late mother, Allison, as a woman of endless charm and infinite love for her unruly brood of red-headed children. When Allison is diagnosed with cancer, McColl drops everything to return to the family farmhouse to tend to her mother in the best way she knows how-- by sweating over elaborate meals in the hopes of nourishing her back to health. In doing so, she boldly confronts her own identity as a woman. -- adapted from jacket

✦ Subjects

FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS -- Death, Grief, Bereavement