In her engaging new memoir, Michelle Herman notes that memoirs on the job of motherhood depict it in two ways: grueling, exhausting work coupled with showerlessness and an utter absence of selfhood or beatific transcendent earth-motherhood, complete with nimbus and attractive housedress. She imagines “motherhood as feast,” “Motherhood is like riding the flying trapeze...It’s like being shot out of a cannon...Motherhood as a three-ring circus,” thereby combining the two extremes. Her experiences with her daughter, both troubled and exhalted, will fascinate parents and would-be parents alike and collected, they offer compelling insight into the formative processes that make mothers and children.

The writer gathers stories from her past, woven into a loose framework based on the questions that occupy Grace, her precocious only child. When Herman observes her daughter’s friendships, she begins to ask herself about the meaning of such friendship’s, of the neighborhood friend, the school friend, the all-important best friend. She uses her daughter’s growing years to explore her own history, and importantly for the author, how that history has affected her as a mother. The first few sections of the memoir meander along, a little self-indulgently, moving in and out of time, from childhood to near present. Herman includes a host of her own composite personalities, herself as friend, best friend, girl friend, daughter of a depressed mother, granddaughter of an powerful grandmother, teacher, obsessive mother, and happy wife to talk about love and relationships that affect the ways in which people love. The focus of the memoir also shifts frequently, to allow Herman to offer a kind of fable at the end of many of her anecdotes, giving one the sense that the memoir is written as much for Grace as for the reader. Certainly, Herman’s experience as a fiction writer reflects positively in her careful construction of details, the authentic dialogue, the shaping of the setting from Ohio to New York City, but the book doesn’t seem to find its focus until the last section, when the construction of the writer’s past becomes startlingly relevant.

Herman narrates her own transition from working writer and serial dater to mother of Grace for whom Herman has determined to be both essential and unfailingly present unlike the depressed mother of her own childhood. Ultimately, her plan smothers her daughter who begins to take drastic measure at three months old by refusing to nurse. Herman wins that battle but problems escalate when her perfectly behaved daughter turns six and begins exhibiting obsessive compulsive behavior resulting in an eventual breakdown. Herman’s own obsessive instinct to cater to her child’s every need wars with the directions of doctors, and she chronicles the fight in vivid details of doctor’s offices, tantrums, self-recriminations and child psychology. Bravely, Herman acknowledges her complicity, dramatically claiming herself, in dark times, the world’s worst mother. Sometimes that drama overtakes the narrative, overtipping the fragile balance of subject and self in a memoir. Still, Herman rescues her daughter and her writing largely because of the love that she celebrates in the book. She tells each anecdote with verve, quick details and long ruminations. Whatever moment of beauty or truth, and there are many, that Herman might have missed the first time around as mother, she made sure to catch the second time around as writer.