Be Good to Your Mother

From a brilliant, award-winning poet, a luminous, unsparing memoir that chronicles the simultaneous collapse of the author’s sixteen-year marriage and her mother’s diagnosis: an aneurysm in her heart waiting to blow “like a submarine volcano”; the twin events bring back the author’s past of poverty and displacement, threatening to drown the life she thought she’d made impervious for her own three children.

“I thought I would never be free of my mother until I met my husband. Then I thought I could never leave my husband because he would hand me back to my mother.”

In a Vermont cabin with no running water, Hillery Stone learned the rules of survival early: Sleep close to your mother. Recite the presidents in order when she’s down. Never cut your hair. Above all, don’t let her die.

Decades later, as Stone’s marriage quietly collapses and a custody battle looms, her titanic, volatile mother falls—fracturing a hip and revealing an aneurysm growing silently on her heart. Suddenly, Stone is pulled, once again, toward the woman she has spent a lifetime trying to leave.

Moving through the houses that shaped four generations—a pink farmhouse, a Brooklyn apartment, the crumbling structures of her childhood—Stone traces a tangled inheritance: a grandfather who hanged himself, a grief-stricken poet grandmother, a mother who was both refuge and wreckage. Threaded with the lives of birds, octopuses, and the houses we cannot stop returning to, this is a fierce, clear-eyed reckoning with what it means to be “born a mother.”

Unsparing, darkly funny, and luminous, Be Good to Your Mother asks the question every daughter eventually faces: Can we ever truly leave the people who made us?