Reading Jane

Name: Reading Jane
ISBN: 978-1736795477

by Susannah Kennedy

Publisher

Sibylline Press

Publication

Sep 05, 2023

Format

Paperback/Softback

Illustrated

Price

$19.00

Dimensions

5 x 8.25 x 0.75 in

ISBN

978-1736795477

ASIN

1736795473

Pages

306

Age

Adult 18+

Rights Sold

🌍 World Wide Rights Available

Description

A gripping memoir that shows what freedom looks like when we choose to examine the uncomfortable past

Jane is to the world a charismatic personality – opinionated, an inner-city teacher and public activist, a lover of Italy, proud and successful – who thrives on a carefully crafted life narrative. Susannah, her beautiful only daughter and her intended protégé, senses the stricter, darker truth, and fights to resist the control imposed on her by her mother’s narcissistic tale, especially as Susannah becomes a mother herself.

But then Jane at 75, healthy and fit, chooses suicide, leaving her daughter with grief and the unwelcome gift of 45 years of hidden diaries. Daring to “read” Jane after her death is like unlatching Pandora’s Box. For a year, Susannah twists and turns to the truths she uncovers, comparing what she remembers with what her mother put down in words. As Susannah Kennedy re-lives her life through her mother’s eyes, she grapples with the ties between mothers and daughters and the choices parents make.

Awards & Endorsements

Kirkus Reviews

Kennedy reads through her mother’s decades of diaries, reliving her childhood from her

mother’s perspective.

The author’s mother, Jane, died by suicide, leaving her affairs and possessions to be sorted out by her daughter. A few years later, Kennedy began to read through her mother’s diaries, which spanned decades, in an effort to understand Jane’s choice. In the process of reading, she pieced together forgotten elements from her childhood to find some closure to their relationship.

Through the diary entries included throughout the text, Kennedy details the strained relationship she had with her constantly critical mother. One of the primary motivations for her criticism seemed to come from Jane’s perception of the author’s similarities to her father, Alan, a physically abusive alcoholic she divorced when Kennedy was 6 years old. As the author moves through the diaries, Jane is revealed to have been a relatively indifferent mother whose criticisms formed a number of Kennedy’s insecurities. While recounting her life through the lens of the diary entries, the author also ponders interesting metacognitive questions about writing and memory (“it’s like those times we drive and then realize we are twenty miles farther along and don’t remember getting there. What is really going on with me?”); the structure of the memoir is loosely chronological, containing parallel narratives, with one timeline progressing from the moment Kennedy found out about her mother’s death and the other following her

Review

“With luminous writing, Susannah taps into that which is both universal to the mother-daughter bond and also that which is sublimely unique to this very personal and beautifully written story about love, betrayal, domestic violence, and the ultimate act of power and control- taking one's own life and leaving loved ones behind to pick up the emotional wreckage. … Breathtakingly beautiful in its execution and reads like a gripping mystery.” —Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine and Sacred Medicine

"From the opening page, Reading Jane summoned my attention and held me spellbound to the end. With graceful prose and an unflinching gaze, Susannah Kennedy led me into a provocative meditation on what it means to reckon with the stories bequeathed to us—those written down, lived, weaponized, hidden, rewritten—and the lies and truth they animate. … 'A Daughter’s Memoir,' the subtitle of this book, matters. Although the mother in this story attempts to control the narrative and the spotlight, the daughter is the one with a profound gift for the reader: the chance to witness the transformation of a child raised to deny so much of herself into an adult who allows and embraces the fullness of everyone. And at the heart of that gift, the permission for the reader to do the same.” —Jen Violi, Author of Putting Makeup on Dead People

“Wow! was my first reaction on finishing Susannah Kennedy’s breathtaking memoir, Reading Jane. For days I was deeply immersed in Kennedy’s courageous exploration of her relationship with her mother, as she bravely examines her own psyche and comes to better understand herself, her mother, and their complex effects on one another. Brava to Susannah Kennedy for allowing us to accompany her on this fascinating journey.” —Susan Buckley, author of Eating with Peter

"Some of the most honest, heartfelt, beautiful CNF I have ever read, both as an editor and as a reader." —Liza Olson, editor of (mac)ro(mic)

“The best book I’ve read in years. The alternating spirals of love and distancing between an adult daughter who sought warmth, and a mother who just couldn’t deliver it. Elegant and beautifully written.” —David Bodanis, best-selling author of The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean

“Reading Jane is a beautifully told story of a mercurial, larger-than-life mother whose choice to end her own life while still in her prime sets her daughter on a quest to understand her mother’s inner world by reading her diaries. A fascinating tale of mother-daughter love shot through with longing, enmeshment an...

Author(s)

Susannah Kennedy

Berkeley and Oxford-educated anthropologist Susannah Kennedy was born in India before returning to the US, the only child of an ill-fated alcoholic journalist and a larger-than-life inner-city teacher. As an adult, Kennedy traveled extensively on her own, first in Italy, and then through the Middle East and India, settling for two years in Egypt before moving as a reporter to Dallas, Texas. At Oxford University, she specialized in Arab culture and politics, receiving her DPhil in social anthropology. She and her psychoanalyst husband then lived and worked in Germany, raising three children in a thatched-roof farmhouse in the countryside outside Hamburg. Her mother’s suicide and its aftermath brought them back to California in 2017 where they now reside. Reading Jane is her first memoir. For more of Susannah's writing, go to www.susannahkennedy.com.