When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends

By Victoria Secunda,

Book cover of When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

Book description

“A book of great value for every daughter and every mother; useful for sons, too.”—Benjamin Spock, M.D. 

From the Introduction:
The goal of this book is to help readers achieve that separation so that they can either find a way to be friends with their mothers, or at least recognize…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I’m a big believer in self-help books. This was recommended to me by a therapist who basically saved my life, navigating me through a very difficult time in my life in my twenties. The author, Victoria Secunda, breaks down all the different dysfunctional types of mothers, with chapters titled “The Avenger”, “The Doormat”, “The Critic”, in an easy-to-understand way. Reading this book helped me “diagnose” my mother, who never took responsibility for her mental illness, always blaming her behavior on her kids or others. This book helped me to understand her more fully, perhaps even feel compassion for her. I…

This was one of the first books I read about the mother-daughter relationship and it helped me understand what was going on between my mother and I. Victoria Secunda outlines the types of behaviours or playbooks that mothers and daughters engage in and how these behaviours harm their relationships and provides helpful suggestions on how to improve their relationship. 

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Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

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