Not the best book or even close to it.

Vonda Singleton
Rating: 3 / 5

Yet, through it all… 60 years… the author’s mother took pretty good care of herself.

What’s kind of disturbing is the pride with which this author describes her mother’s career accomplishments and “good moments” of non-abusive interaction.

While the book is intensely personal and the author’s analyses brilliant on many relational points, I was concerned for this author on one important point. When it is obvious that this author’s mother is pathologically competitive, jealous and cruel, I just don’t know why anyone would keep going back to the well for more… it just cannot be worth it. Ms Morgan speaks of geographical distancing and gradually setting boundaries, but clearly that wasn’t enough because as she points out you cannot control what other people say and do and her mother continued to sucker-punch her with abject mean-spiritedness even when the author was in her 60s. She left the house at 19; why blow four more decades on trying to make her mother into someone she couldn’t be?

It seems obvious to this reader that that the sooner this author walked away the better for her. She was destroyed over and over by this mother and the mother’s influence on her brother… what’s the point? I understand the time frame the thinking on this took place; the author is in her 60s. I think a more enlightened point of view nowadays would be to cut it off with someone this overtly cruel, even if he/she be a parent. The author repeatedly references the Fourth Commandment, to honor thy parents, as a guide to her behavior but it is the book’s bad message. If the parent is narcisstic bully with no empathy or regard for her daughter, then how is honor the proper response? It just isn’t. Unconditional love in return for deliberate life long cruelty/deprivation/neglect is not reasonable. Period.

And this point is easy to make in two quick arguments. While pretty much everyone can reproduce, not everyone is psychologically healthy/mentally balanced.Clearly, in the innumerable permutations of the human personality there are people who cannot wish for better for their children or even wish them well. And, there are those, like this author’s mother, who actively wish to destroy them when they have power over their lives. I see total avoidance and self-protectiveness more than forgiveness and continuing interaction as the solutions here.

Secondly, what does “honor” mean? Refusing to deal with someone that uses every opportunity to do you harm, and/or historically has basically destroyed you over and over is not the opposite of honor. And there is one more point that the author seems to miss: this author’s mother functioned better, even normally, in areas of her life like her civil service job, but not with her daughter. Her daughter, this author, consistenly triggered vicious jealously, competition and vengefulness. Evidently, this narcissitic mother saw her darling four year old daughter and felt mostly rage and resentment and retaliation and then with a sense of entitlement acted on those emotions… for a lifetime, refusing to recognize or be grateful to this child for all she was forced to do. Heartless. Nefarious. Unforgivable.

I would defer to Alice Miller’s point of view on the “honor thy parents” commandment when dealing with a sadistic parent. When a parent is this destructive it is a pathology and that person needs to be cut out of your life. Go to the book by Alice Miller: “The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effect of Cruel Parenting,” in regards to the Fourth Commandment, Page 130: “… as soon as we opt out of this value system it would be absurd for an adult woman to be expected to honor her parents for either being brutally cruel to her, or for looking on and failing to intervene.” Exactly. She goes on to say that the idea of most therapists is that success of therapy is forgiveness of the errant parent by the person in therapy and goes on to explain the ridiculousness of that position. I would hope that this is changing in therapy-world.

Page 53 of the same Miller book: “People who have done you such harm do not deserve your love or respect, even if they are your parents. The price you pay for such filial devotion is appalling, the terrible physical torments you repeatedly go through. You can free yourself from the Fourth Commandment.”

Other than the constant trying to make a relationship work with her mother the book had some outstanding analyses. I wish Ms. Morgan the absolute best.

Rating: 5 / 5

Probably one of the most insecure, unhappy, nasty pieces of work I’ve ever seen or read. I was willing to give the book a chance, mostly because it was the only book at a safari club, left by the last guest. No doubt as bored as I was.

She’s physically frightening with all the surgery she’s had and she just isn’t funny; she’s obnoxious, unlovable and nasty. I love irreverance but she’s so obvious and so over the top that my heart actually almost goes out to someone so desperate for the attention she could probably never get at home. “Please, God, someone pay attention to me!!!?” That’s the only thing I heard throughout this book. Shame on her parents…!

Obviously I’m bitter over spending my time reading this book when I could have been doing something more pleasant, like shoving bamboo shoots under my nails.
Rating: 1 / 5