As much as we are shaped by mothers, they too are shaped by their times and social milieu.
In three new books, Abdellah Taïa, Gish Jen, and Molly Jong-Fast grapple with their mothers and the complexity of those difficult and loving relationships. In Living in Your Light (tr. Emma Ramadan), Taïa follows three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman and fictionalized version of his mother, from 1954 to 1999. In Bad Bad Girl, Jen blends autofiction and memoir to trace her mother’s life from her birth in Shanghai in 1924 in an attempt to understand why her mother was so hard on her. Jong-Fast’s memoir How to Lose Your Mother follows a year in the author’s life as she navigates her mother’s dementia and looks back on her sometimes chaotic childhood as the daughter of a celebrity mother.
Moderated by Dalia Azim (Country of Origin), this conversation will traverse Morocco, Shanghai, and 1970s New York City to explore the most fundamental relationship of all: mother and child.
