Media Review

Book: Her Mother's Daughter by Linda Carroll

After recently rediscovering the genius of Courtney Love and Hole and discovering that Natasha likes to dance to the song "Celebrity Skin," I scrounged the library for Courtney Love information and discovered that her mother, Linda Carroll, has written a memoir about her life called Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courney Love. I took the book out from curiosity, not knowing if I would actually read it.

Last week I decided to have a look while I was nursing Natasha to sleep for a nap. I was hooked instantly and actually read a whole book within a week (I have not done this since before Natasha came along!). Carroll has a distinct voice and is a fantastic writer. The book reads like a novel and is not at all a celebrity tell-all, capitalize-on-sensationalism book like it could be, knowing her famous daughter. Instead, Carroll talks about her childhood as an adopted daughter of a couple who could not have children, her relationships with men, which are not many but all of them end up with at least one baby! She was married four times and after her first sexual encounter resulted in an ectopic pregnancy that took one ovary and threatened to take her life, ended up with five living children and one who died at only a few months old. Oh, and she and her third husband adopted a child.

Through a lot of counselling work and years of trying to help her family stay together and emotionally healthy, Carroll finally realizes that her relationship with her adopted parents (a distant and cold mother and a father who treated her "sexually inappropriately") were to blame for her troubles with men and keeping husbands. As for keeping her relationship with her first-born daughter, Courtney (who herself chose the last name Love), the book jacket mentions bipolar disorder, but Carroll never labels her daughter's behaviour that she tries so hard to persevere and help her daughter through. Carroll's dedication to her family is evident as she recounts the heartache of trying to keep everyone together and happy.

In her thirties, after divorcing her third husband and with four children to care for, Carroll returned to school to take the last course of her BA and then complete a Master's Degree. She then opens a practice as a counsellor, helping others the way her "problem behaviour" as a child (a restless talker who was more interested in people than math books) had prepared her for.

This woman overcame much adversity and hardship to get to where she is now. She finally tracked down her mother when she was in her forties to discovered that her real mother is the author Paula Fox! I found the book inspiring and a good way to put things in perspective to remind me of how great my life is. And it was a great read.

Her Mother's Daughter is published by Doubleday.

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