Reading Jane

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A01=Susannah Kennedy
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Susannah Kennedy
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BM
Category=DNC
Category=VFV
Category=VFX
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
elder suicide
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_health-lifestyle
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_parenting
family narratives
generational secrets
Language_English
mother daughter relationships
mother daughter stories
mother stories
narcissistic mother
PA=Available
parenting
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
softlaunch
suicide
surviving your parents
women's memoir

Product details

  • ISBN 9781736795477
  • Dimensions: 142 x 218mm
  • Publication Date: 19 Oct 2023
  • Publisher: Sibylline Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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A gripping memoir that shows what freedom looks like when we choose to examine the uncomfortable past

Jane is to the world a charismatic personality – opinionated, an inner-city teacher and public activist, a lover of Italy, proud and successful – who thrives on a carefully crafted life narrative. Susannah, her beautiful only daughter and her intended protégé, senses the stricter, darker truth, and fights to resist the control imposed on her by her mother’s narcissistic tale, especially as Susannah becomes a mother herself.

But then Jane at 75, healthy and fit, chooses suicide, leaving her daughter with grief and the unwelcome gift of 45 years of hidden diaries. Daring to “read” Jane after her death is like unlatching Pandora’s Box. For a year, Susannah twists and turns to the truths she uncovers, comparing what she remembers with what her mother put down in words. As Susannah Kennedy re-lives her life through her mother’s eyes, she grapples with the ties between mothers and daughters and the choices parents make.

Berkeley and Oxford-educated anthropologist Susannah Kennedy was born in India and raised in the United States. Later, she traveled extensively on her own, first in Italy, and then through the Middle East and India, settling for two years in Egypt before becoming a reporter in Dallas, Texas. At Oxford University, she specialized in Arab culture and politics, receiving her DPhil in social anthropology. She and her psychoanalyst husband lived and worked in Germany, raising three children in a thatched-roof farmhouse in the countryside outside Hamburg. Her mother’s suicide and its aftermath brought them back to Santa Cruz, California in 2017. They now reside in Marin County.

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