What We're Reading: Rita

Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way by Ruth Reichl.

Ruth Reichl entertained friends and readers of her earlier memoirs (Tender at the Bone; Comfort Me With Apples) with many “Min stories” about her mother Miriam’s eccentricities, but eventually, Miriam’s increasingly erratic behavior strained their mother-daughter relationship. Years after her death, Ruth delivered an acceptance speech at an awards banquet in which she credited her mother with inspiring her by "being everything I didn’t want to be”. After the speech, Ruth went in search of her mother’s diaries and letters; this book is the result of what she discovered in those papers. This is a heartrending portrait of a woman forced into unwanted conformity by her family and the social attitudes of her time and her absolute determination that her daughter Ruth would never feel the same pain. A lovely exploration of the often thorny mother-daughter bond and a beautiful tale of a daughter’s discovery of the mother she never knew.