When she arrives home after years of absence, on the run from yet another terrible mishap, there is no hiding from the fact that her family is not like other families. There are a lot of things that Eleanor can't quite remember, and many family secrets that she has never understood.
This is the best way to describe the premise of Rose Szabo's debut novel, What Big Teeth - though the Zarrin family is both much stranger and more dour than the affable Addamses.Įleanor Zarrin hasn't been home to her family's ramshackle mansion in Maine since her grandmother, the matriarch, sent her away to boarding school as a punishment for some terrible mishap that Eleanor can't remember clearly. In a society where perfection in parenting is the unattainable ideal, this compassionate book offers some prescriptions for relief by showing women how they can affect positive change in their lives.What if Wednesday Addams had been sent away to boarding school when she was little? Would she remember all the secrets of her monstrous family? Would she remember why, of all of them, she was the one so dangerous that she had to be banished?
Weaving together case histories with rich examples from literature and popular culture, Almond uncovers the roots of ambivalence, tells how it manifests in lives of women and their children, and describes a spectrum of maternal behavior-from normal feelings to highly disturbed mothering characterized by blame, misuse, abuse, even child murder. In a compelling portrait of the hidden side of contemporary motherhood, she finds that ambivalence of varying degrees is a ubiquitous phenomenon, yet one that too often causes anxiety, guilt, and depression. In this beautifully written book, Barbara Almond draws on her extensive clinical experience to bring this highly troubling issue to light. Whether it is uncertainty over having a child, fears of pregnancy and childbirth, or negative thoughts about one's own children, mixed feelings about motherhood are not just hard to discuss, they are a powerful social taboo. This is essential reading for mothers, in psychotherapy or not, for fathers, and for therapists, including male therapists who will become better able to see women's bodies and motherhood from a woman's perspective."Stanley Coen, M.D., author of Affect Intolerance in Patient and Analyst Review Her evocative clinical and literary stories make ambivalence a bit easier for mothers to bear. "Barbara Almond's book is a wonderful new resource for helping mothers, especially new mothers, to tolerate that love between them and their children must be burdened by resentment. This book is enormously useful to mothers, clinicians and anyone else interested in the psychology of motherhood."≽aphne de Marneffe, author of Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life Almond's fresh insights and perspectives regarding maternal ambivalence help us to become more comfortable with these feelings. Chodorow, author of The Reproduction of Mothering Her expertly presented material provides the lively underpinning of this compelling book."Nancy J. The Monster Within presents richly nuanced and detailed cases that give the reader a sense of what these difficult feelings of ambivalence are, as they are experienced day to day, consciously and unconsciously. Barbara Almond, an experienced psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, shows us how and why this is so. Such feelings are particularly scary for mothers, and Dr. "Psychoanalysis has always addressed the monster within: conflicts, fears, and those unacceptable feelings of anger, envy, and hatred with which we all grapple.
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