Publisher's Synopsis
A first-generation American daughter excavates her complicated relationship with her mother in this deeply affecting memoir about the enduring legacy of the stories we tell one another. How much can you judge another woman's choices? What if that woman is your mother? Maya Lang grew up idolizing her brilliant mother, an accomplished psychologist who immigrated to the United States from India, completed her residency and earned an American medical degree--all while nurturing young children and keeping a traditional Indian home. Maya grew up with her mother's stories ringing in her ears, motivating her, encouraging her, offering solace when she needed it. But after Maya moves across the country and becomes a mother herself, everything changes. Their connection, which had once seemed so invulnerable, begins to fray. Maya's mother, once attentive and capable, becomes a grandmother who is cold and distant. As Maya herself confronts the challenges of motherhood, she realizes that the one person on whom she has always relied cannot be there for her. But she does not understand why. Maya begins to reexamine the stories of her childhood in search of answers to her questions about what is happening to her family. Who is her mother, really? Were the stories she told--about life in India, about what it means to be an immigrant in America, about what it means to be a mother--ever really true? Affecting, raw, and poetic, Woman in the River is one woman's investigation into her mother's past, the myths she believed, the truths she learned, and her realization that being able to accept both myth and reality is what has finally brought her into adulthood. This is the story of a daughter and her mother, of lies and truths, of being cared by and caring for; it is the story of how we can never really grow up until we fully understand the people who raised us.
