How to Love Your Daughter

Paperback, 272 pages

Published July 16, 2023 by Riverhead Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-53965-1
Goodreads:: 63185084

The seemingly inexplicable estrangement between a woman and her grown daughter opens up a troubling question: What damage do we do in the blindness of love?

Thousands of miles from home, a woman stands on a dark street, peeking through well-lit windows at two little girls. They are the grandchildren she’s never met, daughters of the daughter she has not seen in years.

At the center of this mesmerizing story is the woman’s quest to understand how a relationship that began in bliss—a mother besotted with her only child—arrived at a point of such unfathomable distance. Weaving back and forth in time, she unravels memories and long-buried feelings, retracing the infinite acts of parental care, each so mundane and apparently benign, that in ensemble may have undermined what she most treasured. With exquisite psychological precision, Blum traces the seemingly insignificant missteps and deceptions of family life, where it’s …

The seemingly inexplicable estrangement between a woman and her grown daughter opens up a troubling question: What damage do we do in the blindness of love?

Thousands of miles from home, a woman stands on a dark street, peeking through well-lit windows at two little girls. They are the grandchildren she’s never met, daughters of the daughter she has not seen in years.

At the center of this mesmerizing story is the woman’s quest to understand how a relationship that began in bliss—a mother besotted with her only child—arrived at a point of such unfathomable distance. Weaving back and forth in time, she unravels memories and long-buried feelings, retracing the infinite acts of parental care, each so mundane and apparently benign, that in ensemble may have undermined what she most treasured. With exquisite psychological precision, Blum traces the seemingly insignificant missteps and deceptions of family life, where it’s possible to cross the line between protectiveness and possession without even seeing it—and uncertain whether, or how, we can find our way back.

1 edition

enne📚 reviewed How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum

5 stars

I quite enjoyed this book that plumbs the emotional waters of an estrangement between the narrator Yoella and her daughter Leah. The writing (in translation from Hebrew) is delicious and full of meandering sentences. I love the way that Yoella reads a lot and so this book itself can explicitly reference other texts.

It's a book focusing on the relationship between Yoella and Leah, but it's also about motherhood and family in general--that motherhood is forgetting, what love actually means and can look like, and about constructing narratives of the past and of each other. Somehow Yoella manages to be utterly open in dissecting her feelings and her past, but simultaneously unreliable and self-deceiving.

But stories about mothers and daughters are always in media res, working backward to the beginning, even as there is no beginning. The path is simple yet crooked, the beginning slinks ever further …

I quite enjoyed this book that plumbs the emotional waters of an estrangement between the narrator Yoella and her daughter Leah. The writing (in translation from Hebrew) is delicious and full of meandering sentences. I love the way that Yoella reads a lot and so this book itself can explicitly reference other texts.

It's a book focusing on the relationship between Yoella and Leah, but it's also about motherhood and family in general--that motherhood is forgetting, what love actually means and can look like, and about constructing narratives of the past and of each other. Somehow Yoella manages to be utterly open in dissecting her feelings and her past, but simultaneously unreliable and self-deceiving.

But stories about mothers and daughters are always in media res, working backward to the beginning, even as there is no beginning. The path is simple yet crooked, the beginning slinks ever further away. As with the universe or numbers, there is no beginning.

In the first dozen pages, Yoella describes a Scandanavian movie where a beautiful family experiences a brief avalanche; the avalanche never comes close to touching the family but in the pivotal seconds of danger, the father runs away while the mother protects the children, and this is the crack in the family. The rest of the movie is about the rift that this "easily made yet unforgivable mistake" creates, told with Swedish restraint. This movie, told in reverse, is the best description of the book that I can give.