Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter

by JenniMurray (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.25

  The only child of an electrical engineer and a mother who resented the fact that she'd never been to university, the broadcaster Jenni Murray grew up in a traditional household in the 1950s. But instead of becoming the conventional housewife her mother expected her to be, Jenni opted to forge her own path in both her career and her personal life. The resulting tensions have lasted as long as she can remember. How, she has often wondered, could two women be so close, so full of love for each other, and at the same time so full of hate that they broke each other's hearts? And so Jenni began her remarkable memoir - and continued to write throughout 2006 as her mother lay dying, and Jenni struggled to care for her and her beloved father while herself being treated for breast cancer. Filled with love and laughter, frustration and heartbreak, and with the courage 'to keep on keeping on' even in the darkest days, it will speak to every mother and daughter, dutiful or not.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $3.25

  'I feel I'm beginning a love letter. I'm saying things I could not have expressed even a year ago because there was a barrier between us. It collapses today in hospital when I hold my mother's hand and stroke her hair, and she says. 'Do you love me? I've often wondered.' So begins Jenni Murray's memoir as she visits her mother in hospital. She is not, she acknowledges, the only woman to have had a difficult relationship with her parent, yet family history and the times in which they lived seemed to mitigate any chance of a true reconciliation between them.With the benefits of the Women's Movement behind her, and the chance to go to university and have a career, Jenni broke free from her mother's constraints, but never from her influence. Determined to go her own way, she has always felt a sense of guilt: she has been a 'not so dutiful daughter'. And then, after she began her memoir, Jenni's life took a distinctly downward turn. Her mother and father died within six months of each other, and she found that she had breast cancer. This book is a diary of that terrible year - and an extraordinarily honest and confessional memoir of a universally complex relationship: that of a child and her mother and her father.