Hila Blum

The seemingly inexplicable estrangement between a woman and her grown daughter opens up a troubling question: What damage do we do in the blindness of love? Thousands of miles from home, a woman stands on a dark street, peeking through well-lit windows at two little girls. They are the grandchildren she’s never met, daughters of the daughter she has not seen in years. At the center of this mesmerizing story is the woman’s quest to understand how a relationship that began in bliss—a mother besotted with her only child—arrived at a point of such unfathomable distance. Weaving back and forth in time, she unravels memories and long-buried feelings, retracing the infinite acts of parental care, each so mundane and apparently benign, that in ensemble may have undermined what she most treasured. With exquisite psychological precision, Blum traces the seemingly insignificant missteps and deceptions of family life, where it’s possible to cross the line between protectiveness and possession without even seeing it—and uncertain whether, or how, we can find our way back.

A Novel

How to Love Your Daughter

jil ★彡

Her father was also in love with her; we talked about her every night after she fell asleep, thanked each other for the gift that was our girl. Everything that I had been denied I gave to her, and then some. And she loved me too.

Before I became a mother, perhaps I didn't understand how girls are loved. I mean, how to love them. I had heard about the arcane forces that make mothers omnipotent; I had read in the papers about a woman who lifted a car with her bare hands to pull her daughter out from under it, and a woman who clutched her baby girl in her arms for two whole days as they clung to a piece of driftwood in the ocean, and a woman who killed the person who'd hurt her daughter, and I knew that a mother's love could be savage and unbridled — it was the journey of everyday love that I didn't understand. And then I did. Leah was born, and I understood.

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