Lulu Rosetti is manipulated into visiting her toxic family, and while there she uncovers secrets.

"Lulu Rosetti, a thirty-three year old word processor and tarot reader, is urgently summoned by her mother to her New Jersey childhood home to help Lulu's only sibling, a younger sister, recover from a vitamin-induced suicide attempt. Over the course of Lulu's one week stay with her too-close family, she's sure that moving to California was the right thing to do. She's as certain about this as much as she's certain that terminating her pregnancy twelve years ago was the right thing to do though she obsessively wonders about her aborted fetus"--

The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe first-hand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. Many of the writers articulate difficult and socially unsanctioned maternal anger and ambivalence. In Mother Reader, motherhood is scrutinized for all its painful and illuminating subtleties, and addressed with unconventional wisdom and candor. What emerges is a sense of a community of writers speaking to and about each other out of a common experience, and a compilation of extraordinary literature never before assembled in a single volume.

Research into parent-child relationships is a diverse field of inquiry, attracting investigators from a variety of disciplines and subdisciplines. This book integrates and synthesizes the literature by focusing on issues concerning the parent. The text is organized around four key questions: What determines parental behavior? What are the effects of parenting on children? What makes some parents more effective than others? Why do some parents maltreat their children? George Holden adopts a dynamic rather than a static perspective on parenting. This dynamic approach reflects parents' capacity to modify their behavior as they respond to changes in their children and in their own lives. Throughout the text, historical antecedents as well as methodological and theoretical issues are highlighted. Although the book is designed for advanced courses focusing on the parent child relationship, it also rovides a good overview for those interested in current research concerning parenting.

Memory has always been crucial to French literature and culture as a means of mediating the relationship between perception and knowledge of the individual coming to terms with his identity in time. Relatively recently, memory has also emerged as the key force in the creation of a collective consciousness in the wider perspective of French cultural history. This collection of essays, selected from the proceedings of a seminar on 'Memory' given by Dr Emma Wilson at the University of Cambridge, offers a fresh evaluation of memory as both a cultural and an individual phenomenon in modern and contemporary French culture, including literature, cinema and the visual arts. 'Anamnesia', the book's title, develops the Aristotelian concept of anamnesis: recollection as a dynamic and creative process, which includes forgetting as much as remembering, concealment as much as imagination. Memory in this extremely diverse range of essays is therefore far from being presented as a straightforward process of recalling the past, but emerges as the site of research and renegotiation, of contradictions and even aporia.