A double memoir by the Cleveland poet Bree. Vignettes of LSD, karma, migraines, daughterhood and marriage.

In What My Mother Gave Me, women look at the relationships between mothers and daughters through a new lens: a daughter’s story of a gift from her mother that has touched her to the bone and served as a model, a metaphor, or a touchstone in her own life. The contributors of these thirty-one original pieces include Pulitzer Prize winners, perennial bestselling novelists, and celebrated broadcast journalists. Whether a gift was meant to keep a daughter warm, put a roof over her head, instruct her in the ways of womanhood, encourage her talents, or just remind her of a mother’s love, each story gets to the heart of a relationship. Rita Dove remembers the box of nail polish that inspired her to paint her nails in the wild stripes and polka dots she wears to this day. Lisa See writes about the gift of writing from her mother, Carolyn See. Cecilia Muñoz remembers both the wok her mother gave her and a lifetime of home-cooked family meals. Judith Hillman Paterson revisits the year of sobriety her mother bequeathed to her when Paterson was nine, the year before her mother died of alcoholism. Abigail Pogrebin writes about her middle-aged bat mitzvah, for which her mother provided flowers after a lifetime of guilt for skipping her daughter’s religious education. Margo Jefferson writes about her mother’s gold dress from the posh department store where they could finally shop as black women. Collectively, the pieces have a force that feels as elemental as the tides: outpourings of lightness and darkness; joy and grief; mother love and daughter love; mother love and daughter rage. In these stirring words we find that every gift, ?no matter how modest, tells the story of a powerful bond. As Elizabeth Benedict points out in her introduction, “whether we are mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, or cherished friends, we may not know for quite some time which presents will matter the most."

In May 2004, I began a morning ritual of sending out devotionals. The devotionals were sent via electronic mail as a source of encouragement, inspiration, correction, hope and admonishment. Within the course of six months, my distribution list had grown from ten people to twenty-five people. Each morning, while faithfully having a hot cup of coffee, the devotionals were distributed. As a result of sending the devotionals, it was consistently communicated how helpful, insightful and inspirational they were. They became so helpful that the majority of the recipients began to forward them to their family and friends, which in turn grew the distribution list even greater. Over the course of the following year, since the inception of the first morning devotional, it was spoken out the mouths of two or three witnesses, that there should be a publication of the devotionals. After much consideration, I present to you a collection of daily devotionals that come straight from my heart to you. Many of the devotionals were birthed out of my own life experiences. Some of them were very painful, bitter, tough, life experiences. But thank God, as a result, I present, "Unleavened- A Collection of Daily Devotions". It is my prayer that these devotionals serve as a source of encouragement, inspiration, correction and motivation for your life, and that more abundantly.

“Humorous, endearing, and intimate.” —TIME “Mother and daughter relationships are always tricky but this peripatetic pair has outdone all of us with this most excellent adventure written by my namesake, author Connie Wang.” —Connie Chung A dazzling mother-daughter adventure around the world in pursuit of self-discovery, a family reckoning, and Asian American defiance In Chinese, the closest expression to oh my god is wo de ma ya. It’s an interjection, a polite expletive, something to say when you’re out of words. Translated literally, it means oh my mother—the instinctual first person you think of when you’re on the cusp of losing it, or putting it all together. In each essay of this hilarious, heartfelt, and pitch-perfectly honest memoir, journalist Connie Wang explores her complicated relationship to her stubborn and charismatic mother, Qing Li, through the “oh my god” moments in their travels together. From attending a Magic Mike strip show in Vegas to experimenting with edibles in Amsterdam to flip-flopping through Versailles, this iconic mother-daughter duo venture into the world to find their place in it, and sometimes rail against it—as well as against each other. There are hijinks, capers, and adventures. There is also tenderness, growth, and discovery. In telling these stories about the places they’ve gone and the things they’ve done, Wang reveals another story: the true story of two women who finally learned that once we are comfortable with the feeling of not belonging—once we can reject the need to belong to any place, community, census, designation, or nation—we can experience something almost like freedom.

My MotherÕs Funeral circles around the death of the authorÕs mother, but what also emerges is a landscape of personal loss and pain, of innocence, humor, violence and beauty. Drawing heavily upon her childhood experiences and Colombian heritage, P‡ramo describes the volatile bond linking mothers and daughters in a culture largely unknown to Americans. The book moves between past (Colombia in the 1940s) and present lives, and maps scenes both geographical (Bogot‡, Medell’n, Anchorage) as well as psychological--ultimately revealing the indomitable spirit of the women in her family. Especially from P‡ramoÕs mother the reader learns what it means to be a Colombian woman.