How to Manage Your Mother: Skills and Strategies to Improve Mother-Daughter Relationships

In this provocatively titled self-help book, psychotherapists Cocola and Matthews ( Why Did I Marry You, Anyway? ) contend that even professionally successful women, among those of all ages and backgrounds they interviewed, fail to relate positively to their mothers. After offering up a horrendous gallery of maternal styles--chronically anxious, hypercritical, competitive, etc.--the authors advocate methods for dealing with all, starting with the gradual creation of a flexible ``optimum distance'' between mother and daughter and evolving a relationship to accommodate other family members and events in their respective lives. While these strategies--some are pat--may or may not succeed in ``managing'' a mother, the authors' theory of an ``internalized maternal'' voice dooms the poor daughters to be ``wired'' forever to a ``Mother Within'' whom they must also learn to manage, lest she dominate them even after the actual mother's passing. First serial to McCall's; Literary Guild and Psychotherapy Book Club alternates; author tour. (May)