NEW YORK TIMESΒ BESTSELLERΒ β’ AΒ moving memoir about the legendary authorβs relationship with herΒ ownΒ mother.
Emma Watsonβs Our Shared ShelfΒ Book Club Pick!
The story of Maya Angelouβs extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother.
For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presenceβa presence absent during much of Angelouβs early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call βLady,β revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them.
Delving into one of her lifeβs most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelouβs rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights.
Praise for Mom & Me & Mom
βMom & Me & Mom is delivered with Angelouβs trademark good humor and fierce optimism. If any resentments linger between these lines, if lives are partially revealed without all the bitter details exposed, well, that is part of Angelouβs forgiving design. As an account of reconciliation, this little book is just revealing enough, and pretty irresistible.ββThe Washington Post
βMoving . . . a remarkable portrait of two courageous souls.ββPeople
β[The] latest, and most potent, of her serial autobiographies . . . [a] tough-minded, tenderhearted addition to Angelouβs spectacular canon.ββElle
βMesmerizing . . . Angelou has a way with words that can still dazzle us, and with her mother as a subject, Angelou has a near-perfect muse and mystery woman.ββEssence