And this is all not to mention the glut of memoirs by mothers themselves.

There are those memoirs penned by the children of famous literary mothers, like Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother (1994) by Linda Gray Sexton and IвЂ™m Supposed to Protect You From All This (2016) by Nadja Spiegelman. There are lyric meditations on mothers in prosody coming from poets, such as Saeed JonesвЂ™ aforementioned How We Fight for Our Lives (2019) and The Long Goodbye (2008) by Meghan OвЂ™Rourke. Also, gorgeous tomes that break with conventional form, such as the graphic Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama (2012) by Alison Bechdel, or the comic-reveling Running With Scissors (2002) from Augusten Burroughs. The seminal of the literary memoir itself has often been mother-obsessed, such as Mary KarrвЂ™s The LiarвЂ™s Club (1995) and Jeannette WallsвЂ™ The Glass Castle (2005). These include those written by celebrities, such as Melissa RiversвЂ™ The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation (2015) and Wishful Drinking (2008) by Carrie Fisher. The market of mother-fixated memoirs bubbles over. How could we, whether we want to or not, ever escape them? Or, as Saeed Jones ends his own recent memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives (2019), вЂњOur mothers are why we are hereвЂќ (190). In the Belly of Her Ghost (LARB True Stories, 2018) is at turns a gentle meditation on escape and a violent exorcism of that constant, thrumming, haunting Oedipal yank, that tide that brings us back again and again to our mothers. вЂњMy motherвЂ™s indifference dismantled my life,вЂќ Colin Dayan writes in her new memoir, for вЂњout of the dust and confusion of my childhood, only the desire to escape emergesвЂќ (109). вЂњOnce something bad happens, it will happen again.вЂќ No way around fate, thatвЂ™s what my mother told me. This review has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board.ДЄ review of Colin Dayan, In the Ghost of her Belly (LARB 2019)Дeath hung around my house.

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