Mother Land

To those in her Cape Cod town, Mother is an exemplar of piety, modestly, frugality, and hard work. To her husband and seven children, she is a frequent tormentor and constant scold, the selfish, petty tyrant of Mother Land. She excels at playing her offspring against each other. Her favorite, Angela, is the one who died in childbirth; only Angela really understands her, she tells the others. The others include the officious lawyer, Fred; the uproarious professor Floyd; a pair of inseparable sisters whose slavish devotion to Mother has robbed them of their own lives; and JP, the narrator, a successful writer whom Mother badgers to get a "real job." As she persists for decades (she will live to be over 100), her brood struggles with and among themselves to become free of her viselike hold on them. While there have been powerful memoirs and novels about the effect of addicted and abusive parents on their children, there has been nothing like Mother Land, a piercing portrait of how a parent's narcissism impacts a family. While the particulars of this tale are unique to Theroux's own background - the New England setting, the large family -- he relates with acute clarity and wisdom a circumstance with which literally millions of readers can identify. For them, Mother Land will offer the shock and comfort of recognition. And for others, it will givve an engrossing, heartbreaking, and often funny saga of a clan that bickers, colludes, connives, and ultimately overcomes the painful ties that bind them..