cover image Did My Mama Like to Danc

Did My Mama Like to Danc

. Quill, $12 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-380-77101-1

The myth of the June Cleaver mother is challenged once again in this touching collection of 15 short stories. By illuminating the real women who raise daughters or write poetry or lose their husbands or lose their minds, these tales shatter the concept of the perfect mother. In her introduction, Kothari suggests that by recognizing mothers who do not ``know how to flirt and smile winningly,'' we can accept those mothers who do not behave like ``other mothers,'' and thus accept ourselves. In the most powerful story, Kate Braverman revises her childhood impression of her eccentric mother; instead of seeing her as an unstylish, alcoholic, poetry-writing failure who released her from shame by succumbing to breast cancer, she now sees her mother as a vulnerable, graceful, excitable woman who gave up a life of travel and adventure so that her daughter could lead a normal life in Beverly Hills (``She gave me back my life before I realized that it was not mine.'') Barbara Kingsolver contemplates whether her mother was right when, finding the 16-year-old Kingsolver's birth-control pills, she declared ``that early promiscuity would ruin me psychologically . . . that later in life I'd be unable to hold down a monogamous relationship.'' As an adult, Kingsolver only discovered the courage to break out of an unhappy marriage through an unlikely note from her 13-year-old daughter. These are not the mothers we think we know but the women we ought to. (Apr.)