Looking Back - MotherKind

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals.

MotherKind by Jayne Anne Phillips

Fiction

2000 Knopf

Read in June 2000

Rating: 2/5 (Fair)

Publisher's Blurb:

MotherKind explores the spiritual education at the heart of the most fundamental transition: the child who grows to nurture his or her parent. Kate, whose care for her terminally ill mother coincides with the birth of her first child and the early months of a young marriage, must come to terms with crucial loss and radiant beginnings in the same deftly chronicled year. MotherKind invites the reader into a layering of experience that is nearly limitless, yet wholly ordinary and familiar. First and second marriages, babies and step-children, neighbors, friends, blended families, baby sitters and wise strangers all intermingle in the tumult of an everyday marked by a turning of seasons and the gradual vanishing of Kate's mother, the strong woman who has been her friend, mentor and counterpart across a divide of experience and time.

MotherKind describes a very contemporary situation yet deals with timeless themes. What is the nature of "home", when so many of us live our lives far from where we started? How do we translate all we have passed from into what we carry forward? How are we inextricably linked, even in separation, across generations, cultures, eras; across death itself. In MotherKind, the everyday is illumined with the past as Kate finds her former and present lives joined into one luminous passage.

My Original Thoughts (2000):

Although I managed to finish this book, I didn't think it was all that good. I was bored with large chunks of it and even skimmed some pages (something I rarely do!). I could relate to the step-parenting issues and wanted to reach into the novel and tell Kate it does get better! There were also parts that made me want to have a baby!

My Current Thoughts:

I have no memory of this book and haven't read anything else by the author. Funny that it made me want to have a baby. I was 38 at the time, which certainly isn't too old for babies.