Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and a Daughter - Hardcover

Gordon, Lyndall

3.14

29 ratings by Goodreads

9781844088898: Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and a Daughter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1844088898 ISBN 13: 9781844088898

Publisher: Virago, 2014

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`As a child, I'm to be my mother's "sister" because she wants one so. My part is to be there if she's ill. At four years old, it's a privilege to have this responsibility instead of trotting off to nursery school like other children.'

So begins the renowned and award-wining biographer's book about her own life - particularly in relationship to her mother - an extraordinary and intensely realised tale of loyalty and division; breakdown and recovery; migration and home.

Lyndall Gordon was born in 1941 in Cape Town, a place from which `a ship takes fourteen days to reach anywhere that matters'. Born to a mother whose mysterious illness confined her for years to life indoors, Lyndall was her secret sharer, a child who grew to know life through books, story-telling and her mother's own writings. It was an exciting, precious world, pure and rich in dreams and imagination - untainted by the demands of reality.

But a daughter grows up.

Despite her own inability to leave home for long, Lyndall's mother believed in migration, a belief that became almost a necessity once the horrors of apartheid gripped their country. Lyndall loves the rocks, the sea, the light of Cape Town, but, struggling to achieve a life approved by her mother, she tries and makes a failure of living in Israel and then, back once again in her beloved South Africa she marries and moves with her husband to New York.

It's in America in 1968 when suddenly Lyndall realises she cannot be, and does not want to be, the woman, the daughter and the mother her mother wants her to be.

This is a wonderfully layered memoir about the expectations of love and duty between mother and daughter. The particular time and place, the people and the situation are Lyndall's, but the division between generations, the pain and the joy of being a daughter are everywoman's.

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Review:

Lyndall Gordon manages to avoid being undaughterly about her exciting, difficult, self-obsessed mother . . . as racy as a novel (Guardian)

A biographer with soul, she reaches into the hearts of those she brings alive for us. She makes the meaning of their lives sing and sweat as she invites us into their experiences, their longings, their struggles and their disappointments . . . [a] fascinating mix between memoir and biography (Observer)

[A] beautifully written and troubling memoir (Independent on Sunday)

[A] sensitive exploration of the complexities of motherhood and daughterhood (Sunday Times)

This quietly devastating book takes us into many strange terrains but it is to the 'inner life of that room' in Cape Town that Gordon finds herself returning. It was there she fountained into one of our most sensitive writers (Mail on Sunday)

In Divided Lives, [Gordon] devotes to her mother the kind of care and attention she has previously devoted to the Modernists, and - goodness knows! - her mother, Rhoda, certainly deserves it (Literary Review)

Lyndall Gordon's intrepid and astute biographies of writers . . . frequently yield insights that have eluded previous scholars . . . Now Gordon brings her gift for uncovering startling truths to bear on her own upbringing in 1950s and 60s South Africa (Times Literary Supplement)

Memoir of the year? Divided Lives, Lyndall Gordon's enthralling and painful account of her relationship with her mother (Elizabeth Lowry Times Literary Supplement)

A wonderful read that's both frank and delicate (Sunday Herald)

Book Description:

Lyndall Gordon, the renowned and award-winning biographer of Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Mary Wollstonecraft among others, now turns to her own story with Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter.

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