In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story

Kim Chernin, in In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story, is as much about telling stories as it is about the specific story of the author and her relationship with her mother. It is a book about words, what words say and what words keep hidden. At the same time, it is about how words and stories hold the author and her mother together through the decades of their shared and separate lives. Chernin writes of the roles she and her mother took from the beginning of her life:

I came into the world as my mother's listener, saturated in the broodings, misunderstandings, visions of a life that had begun in the first year of the twentieth century. . . . [The two world] wars, the revolutions that followed them, the sufferings that gave rise to them, had made their way into my mother's stories, along with the lost world of European Jewish life (Chernin xi).

The book, then, is certainly the story of how the author's life is shaped by her mother, and by her mother's stories, but it is finally more about her own stories and the meaning they give to her experiences.

The unique adventures of her mother's life make the author's own life unique, and seem to make her life and family realities markedly different from my own. In comparison, my own life, and particularly my mother's influence and my relationship with her, seem quite different, at least on the surface. At first glance, it would seem that my own life and relationship with my mother were fairly prosaic, compared with the exc

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reality depicted by Allende, I realize i both long for and fear a more vital and unpredictably mysterious spiritual reality in my own life. The supernatural is often taken completely in stride, as when Carla "would announce earthquakes in advance, which was quite useful in that country of catastrophes, for it gave them a chance to lock up the good dishes and place their slippers within reach in case they had to run out in the middle of the night" (Allende 8). This calm acceptance of the mysteries of the spiritual world also appeals to me. However, at times the visions of supernatural phenomena are clearly meant to be taken more seriously, as when Clara and Esteban are dancing at the party where their engagement is announced and Clara is "completely oblivious to the warnings of the spirits that gestured desperately at her from the curtains" (Allende 90). The murder of the great dog Barrabas was occurring at that very moment, but so swept up in the festivities is Clara that she is temporarily beyond the reach of the supernatural warning being sent her way. In another incident, Clara predicts that a man was going to cheat her father in a business deal, but her father ignores the prediction and is indeed swindled. The suggestion

Category: Literature - I