Eight memoirs about losing a mother in childhood

Jacque Gorelick is a California native who has moved too many times to count. She’s lived all over the West Coast from Santa Barbara to Alaska. Now firmly rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives beside a creek under redwood trees with her husband, two boys, and a mélange of rescues.

Before freelance writing, Gorelick spent two decades as an elementary school teacher helping students turn ideas into stories. Her debut memoir, Map of a Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Finding the Way Home, is about hearts (medical and metaphorical) and discovering—through a traumatic medical event and motherhood—the meaning of family.

At Electric Lit Gorelick tagged eight memoirs that "explore the ripple effects of early mother loss on womanhood, motherhood, identity, and belonging. A loss that shapes daughters for a lifetime." One title on the list:

The Manicurist’s Daughter by Susan Lieu

What if your mother died because of a choice you could not understand? How would you remember her or make peace with the loss? This is the journey of Susan Lieu, the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee mother who built a successful business and raised a family in California, only to die young after a botched cosmetic surgery. In her debut memoir, Lieu seeks not only to write her mother into a fully formed and vital woman—which she does—but to reckon with the circumstances of her death. As the author unspools the cultural and societal beauty standards that shaped her mother’s decision, the reader is invited to be part of Lieu’s family dynamics, cultural traditions, and the intimate banter that floats between manicure stations in her mother’s beloved nail shop. The Manicurist’s Daughter is an unflinchingly honest account of a daughter’s quest to understand the mother she lost too soon.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue