“Tender, revelatory, and deeply moving … this book will forever change how you understand motherhood, love, and the power of sisterhood.”
—Amanda Montei, author of Touched Out
“Vivid, brave, and full of grace… a deft, inspired examination of the love and mysteries between moms and their children. … It is delicate and sacred—and as solid as a rock. It is also full of humor and sweetness. I will tell every mother and daughter I know to read this luminous, resonant bell of a book.”
—Savala Nolan, author of Good Woman
“Multidimensional and intimate…My Mother’s Daughter deeply interrogates female sexual deviance across generational secrets and myths.”
— Koa Beck, author of White Feminism
From the author of the memoir Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire (an NPR Best Book of the Year) comes a story of family secrets, sisterhood, and the importance of untangling all that we inherit from our mothers.
Tracy Clark-Flory knew that she had a sister out there, somewhere. Her mom, Deb, had told her about being sent to a home for unwed mothers as a pregnant teenager in the Sixties. After placing her baby for adoption, Deb was committed to a mental institution in her grief. Decades later, she had Tracy, who grew up as an only child longing for her sister.
Now, in her thirties and a mother herself, Tracy took a DNA test in hopes of finding her — and she did.
Newly connected with her half-sister Kathy, both daughters started asking questions about the past that their mom, who had died years earlier, could no longer answer. Tracy, a longtime journalist, set out to make sense of what happened back in 1965.
She learned that their mom had been pulled into a racist and sexist system designed to turn “bad girls” into proper women and wives. Tracy realized that her own life had been profoundly shaped by her mom’s past, but she also uncovered a bigger story about patriarchal control, mother-daughter dynamics, and the way that shame keeps us divided within ourselves and from each other.
Along the way, Tracy started to repair her own inner fractures, and the two sisters came together in ways their mother never could have dreamed.
Blending powerful memoir with cultural criticism and razor-sharp reporting, My Mother’s Daughter is a moving, intimate tale of traumatic inheritance and intergenerational healing. This book is a daughter’s love letter to her mother and a rallying cry to reclaim those parts of ourselves, and our family stories, that are hidden away.