272 pages Short Stories
In Bonnie Jo Campbell’s collection of short stores, Mothers,
Tell Your Daughters, the difficulties of being a woman become quickly evident. Women
are resilient, stubborn, and resourceful. Women are used, abused, and
discarded. The fates of many lower middle class women rest in their
relationship to the men in their lives. And mothers try to tell their daughters
how it is going to be for them to become women in a hostile world.
No one writes better about challenged women than does Bonnie
Jo Campbell. We were introduced to them in her first story collection, American Salvage. Although the characters are different, the themes remain. The first
story that expresses the true nature of the mother-daughter relationship is
called Tell Yourself, in which a
mother with a young teenage daughter worries obsessively that her daughter may
be too much of a flirt and consequently experience some of the abusive
relationships that the mother experienced as a teenager. She breaks up with her boyfriend rather than allow
the possibility that he might be attracted to the girl. The girl, on the other
hand, is appalled that her mother might suspect that she would be interested in
an older man. “Of course, he is just one man of millions out there in the world,
one of dozens of men who might take an interest in your daughter. . .”
The title story, Mothers,
Tell Your Daughters, expresses with sadness the complexity of the mother-daughter
relationship. The mother in this story is dying of cancer, and her estranged
daughter has come to be with her as she dies. No longer verbal, the mother
muses about her life and how her daughter never understood the choices that she made in order to survive and to make sure that her children were raised.
The daughter has become successful in life but is unable to give any credit to
her mother or try to understand her mother’s life choices. The mother muses, “Someday, I
hope, you’ll want to cut me down and gather me up in your arms, forgive me even
if I can’t say I’m sorry.”
Frankly, I admire some of the women that Campbell writes
about—women who know exactly why they make the choices they make; women
who make conscious decisions about survival; women who protect their children at
all costs. At the same time, there is a terrible vulnerability in the women in
the stories—women who have been abused, and who have so little but wish for so
much. In one story, Someplace Warm, the mother seeks to make a safe place for her
children but instead smothers them, and they rebel by leaving her.
Recently, the two women who work for me were able to get an
apartment after many years in rooming houses and homeless shelters. The
apartment isn’t much; just two rooms in a subsidized duplex, but their complete
joy in having a place that is theirs is heartwarming. These women have cared
for abusive spouses, slept in unlikely places, and fought mightily to raise
three children together. I am so grateful that they are finally experiencing a bit
of peace. These are the women of Campbell’s world. As a protagonist of one story says, “Our own
home, a comfortable, well-lit place nobody can take away from us, where each of
us has our own room and closet.”
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters is not a pleasant, warm read,
but several of the stories are unforgettable. The summary paragraph of the
Kirkus review reflects that the book is “a fine showcase for this talented
writer’s ability to mingle penetrating character studies with quietly scathing
depictions of hard pressed lives.”
In addition to everything else I loved about the book, I was extremely attracted to the cover.
The review on the Kirkus website.
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