To celebrate the launch of the Girl project, run in partnership with Ankur Productions, Vanessa reviews Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother: A Diary and Reader by Tillie Olsen
I remember every now and again that the baking tricks and cleaning tips I often mistake as my knowledge are actually owed to my mother. The preferences I think of as constituents of me—the love of marigolds, Madeira cake with cream cheese frosting, Stepmom—they didn’t just appear as buttons on my soul. They are my mom. It is these little invisible debts that comfort me most when I feel too far from home, because I know I will take them with me, whether I want them or not, wherever I am and wherever I go. But the baking tricks and cleaning tips are not my mother’s, either; she has told me of the nights she spent learning from her mother-in-law. Through shared knowledge, I am connected to my mother, to my grandmother, to the woman who taught her.
Tillie Olsen shared this desire to know the threads that link women from one generation to the next, and this book is a result of that curiosity. Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother is an anthology which, according to Olsen, aims to share the beauty of women’s relationships; to encompass the experiences of both the canonised and the undiscovered women writers of the world; to gather from all corners of these experiences that which has been written about mother- and daughterhood; and, most of all, to underscore how much has not been written.
The book is arranged into twelve sections, and each section opens with a small daily ‘diary’. I find it unlikely that Olsen intended for readers to fill these in, as there is barely room for more than a sentence (or two, if they are short). Rather, these introductory pages seem to function more as prompts, checklists to be completed each day as more pieces are read and personal stories remembered.
The twelve sections—some written from, as the title suggests, the perspective of mothers, and some from the perspective of daughters, some sections brimming with love, some with disgust—imbue the anthology with a sort of life span. And, as the twelve sections mirror the twelve months of the year, I felt as though, at the close of the final section, the first section would begin again. In this, Olsen taps into the cyclical nature of mother-daughter relationships, the organic way in which women give care and are given care from birth until death. As an infant, I was cared for by my mother. As an elderly woman, my mother will be cared for by me.
Olsen draws from myriad cultures and the genres to include poetry, personal letters, journal entries and short fiction from 120 writers—women such as Susan Griffin, Janice Mirikitani, Lady Otomo of Sakanoue, Colette, Grace Paley, Margaret Mead, Alice Walker, Ai and Cora Sandel, to name a few. In this wealth of material, Olsen brings to the forefront women of different eras and different countries, many of whom I had never read. And yet, despite the inclusion of such varied writers, Olsen stresses that this anthology is ‘partial in both senses of the word’, constrained by her own experience by her place in history, or perhaps more accurately, ‘herstory’.
It is with this in mind, I feel, that Tillie Olsen included the blank pages before each of the twelve sections; these are prompts for readers to continue the work begun by those whose writings are featured in this anthology. We will always be writing new endings to old chapters and finding the old endings reiterated. So in Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother, Olsen gives us a starting off point.
I’ve found this book more difficult to review than the others I have read this year, because it is not a book as much as it is a project. And it is a project that the editor acknowledges will never be finished. All I can really say is, the passages in Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother provided points of reference against which to contextualise my relationship to the women in my life. These passages inspired me to think about what I have to add to the story of mother- and daughterhood, and most of all, reminded me that I owe much of my self to the women who have nurtured me.
