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A carregar... Silver Riverpor Daisy Goodwin
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'Other children had imaginary friends; I had a fictional mother, a siren from the southern hemisphere.' Daisy Goodwin's mother left home when Daisy was five and embarked upon a bohemian life in Swanage. Daisy was brought up by her respectable father and her meticulous German stepmother and adored her glamorous mother from afar. She made sense of her mother's difference and of her absence through her imaginings about the family's unstable South American history. It was only when Daisy underwent a deep depression following the birth of her own daughter, that she felt the weight of her mother's abandonment and the burden of her family's past take root in her own life. Daisy's family, on her mother's side, is as eccentric and wayward as any family could be. Her Irish forebears - a Catholic and a Protestant - were driven from their southern Irish home and emigrated to Argentina. Their history there is one of vast wealth rapidly acquired and just as rapidly lost, of gambling, of horses, of suicides and breakdowns, of isolation in the bleak expanses of the Pampas and of the heights of high society. In this extraordinary memoir, the contrasts between Argentina and England serve as a metaphor for the clashes in the author's life, caught between two parents, two countries and two cultures. Intensely personal, funny and unsentimental, 'Silver River' explores universal questions about families, identity and growing up in a way that has never been done before. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — A carregar...GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)306.8743092Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Marriage and Parenting Parenting Experiences of Family Caregivers Motherhood Biography And History BiographyClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (4)
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Her parents had an acrimonious divorce when she was a young child, after her mother had abandoned Daisy and her younger brother when she went off wuth her hippyish lover who became Daisy's stepfather. Daisy spent her childhood shuttling between homes. The contrast of the secure, warm and structured life with her father (who eventually remarried) and the chaotic, at times upsetting life, with her mother and stepfather - a man of whom she was frightened. She felt that she was damaged by this childhood, and when she herself married and had a daughter she was filled with anger at the mother who had left her, and could not comprehend how she could have done it. Prone to bouts of depression, she decided to research her maternal family history in the hope of finding out why her mother behaved the way she did. It proved to be an extraordinary tale encompassing Ireland during the potato famine, and the relationship between Protestants and Catholics - a theme that continued through the generations; emigration to the Argentine in the mid 19th Century; life on the pampas, fortunes won and lost, polo ponies, suicides, and more. By the end she feels she does understand her mother better - but is determined not to let her children suffer emotionally as she had done. A most intriguing read, but it would have been even better with a couple of maps, and a rough family tree. (