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This Is Your Mother : A Memoir
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Overview
Named a Best Memoir of 2025 (So Far) by BookPage and Real Simple * "A beautiful story about an extraordinary mother's gift of love and hope." --Jeannette Walls, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle * "Candid...Heartbreaking...Illuminating." --Oprah Daily From "a writer who's absolutely going places" (Roxane Gay), a "bewitching...innovative" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) debut memoir about a mother-daughter relationship across cycles of poverty, separation, and illness, exploring how we forge identity in the face of imminent loss. When Erika Simpson was growing up, her mother loomed large, almost biblical in her life. A daughter of sharecroppers, middle child of ten, her origin story served as a Genesis. Her departure from home and a cheating husband, pursuing higher education along the way a kind of Exodus. Her rules for survival, often repeated like the Ten Commandments, guided Erika's own journey into adulthood. And the most important rule? Throughout her life, Sallie Carol preached the power of a testimony--which often proved useful in talking her way out of a bind with bill collectors. But where does a mother's story end and a daughter's begin? In this brave, illuminating memoir, Erika offers a joint recollection of their lives as they navigate the realities of destitution often left undiscussed. Her mother's uncanny ability to endure Job-like trials and manifest New Testament-style miracles made her seem invincible. But while our parents may start out as gods in our lives, through her mother's final months and fifth battle with cancer, Erika captures the moment you realize they are just people. This gorgeously rendered story of a mother's life through her daughter's eyes weaves together a dual timeline, pulling inspiration from both scripture and pop culture as Erika moves through grief to a place of clarity where she can see who she is without her mom--and because of her.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781668024034
- ISBN-10: 1668024039
- Publisher: Scribner Book Company
- Publish Date: May 2025
- Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.65 pounds
- Page Count: 224
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The bond between mothers and daughters is legendary for its sheer endurance. This Is Your Mother, a debut memoir by the supremely talented Erika J. Simpson, is an eloquent reminder that there are many complicated dimensions to that intimate connection, some tender, some funny, some fraught with pain. Simpson urgently invites the reader to follow daughter and mother from Simpson’s turbulent childhood in Atlanta, to a coming of age that both separates and further entangles them and finally to the inevitable, heartrending conclusion of their relationship.
Simpson was raised by Sallie, her larger than life, highly educated, often unemployed, Bible-toting single mother. Sallie’s undiagnosed bipolar disorder disrupted their everyday existence with hunger, evictions, repossessions and arrests. Yet seen through her child’s eyes, Sallie also had magic: She once created a Christmas tree out of green construction paper taped to a wall, decorated with pine cones. She inspired her children and escaped many a jam—like steep, unpayable taxi fares—by testifying, spontaneously sharing her Bible. Sometimes it even worked. Simpson was paying attention, and the writer propels their story with pseudo Bible quotes, as in “Book of Sallie Carol 1:2: The only things that matter, and the order of their importance, are food and rent.”
Simpson’s growing-up years bridged the 21st century, and she adeptly scatters random pop culture notes throughout her memoir like artifacts. These are perhaps a bit jarring until you begin to understand that the randomness mimics Simpson’s life with her mother, spontaneously pivoting from one crisis to another like, she writes, “camera shutter clicks.” Here was Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the 1990s, eager to save the world just as the teenage Simpson became aware of how badly hers needed help. She was drawn to Jonathan Frakes, host of a favorite television series Beyond Belief, who warned: “We live in a world where the real and the unreal live side by side.”
Along with Sallie’s many eccentricities, Simpson chooses to remember her mother’s steadfast beliefs in education, hope and the power of God’s love. Battles with brain and breast cancer, and, finally, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, didn’t stop Sallie from sending her two daughters to college—and then begging them for money she knew they didn’t have to save her from another arrest or eviction. Whenever the phone rang, Simpson had to decide whether to answer. This Is Your Mother is another kind of answer, honoring what became their eternal, unbreakable bond.
The bond between mothers and daughters is legendary for its sheer endurance. This Is Your Mother, a debut memoir by the supremely talented Erika J. Simpson, is an eloquent reminder that there are many complicated dimensions to that intimate connection, some tender, some funny, some fraught with pain. Simpson urgently invites the reader to follow daughter and mother from Simpson’s turbulent childhood in Atlanta, to a coming of age that both separates and further entangles them and finally to the inevitable, heartrending conclusion of their relationship.
Simpson was raised by Sallie, her larger than life, highly educated, often unemployed, Bible-toting single mother. Sallie’s undiagnosed bipolar disorder disrupted their everyday existence with hunger, evictions, repossessions and arrests. Yet seen through her child’s eyes, Sallie also had magic: She once created a Christmas tree out of green construction paper taped to a wall, decorated with pine cones. She inspired her children and escaped many a jam—like steep, unpayable taxi fares—by testifying, spontaneously sharing her Bible. Sometimes it even worked. Simpson was paying attention, and the writer propels their story with pseudo Bible quotes, as in “Book of Sallie Carol 1:2: The only things that matter, and the order of their importance, are food and rent.”
Simpson’s growing-up years bridged the 21st century, and she adeptly scatters random pop culture notes throughout her memoir like artifacts. These are perhaps a bit jarring until you begin to understand that the randomness mimics Simpson’s life with her mother, spontaneously pivoting from one crisis to another like, she writes, “camera shutter clicks.” Here was Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the 1990s, eager to save the world just as the teenage Simpson became aware of how badly hers needed help. She was drawn to Jonathan Frakes, host of a favorite television series Beyond Belief, who warned: “We live in a world where the real and the unreal live side by side.”
Along with Sallie’s many eccentricities, Simpson chooses to remember her mother’s steadfast beliefs in education, hope and the power of God’s love. Battles with brain and breast cancer, and, finally, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, didn’t stop Sallie from sending her two daughters to college—and then begging them for money she knew they didn’t have to save her from another arrest or eviction. Whenever the phone rang, Simpson had to decide whether to answer. This Is Your Mother is another kind of answer, honoring what became their eternal, unbreakable bond.