Price: $39.95
Page Count: 280
Publication Date: September 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77258-548-3
This thoughtfully curated collection opens up new ways of investigating ideas of motherhood and trauma by fully embracing interdisciplinarity. The range of chapters is impressive in its diversity not only of content but of form: poetry, art, and creative non-fiction interacts with more conventional literary-critical readings, setting all of these approaches in conversation with each other.
- Dr Carol Acton, Dept of English, St Jerome's University (University of Waterloo)
Moving beyond not only paternal legacies of trauma but also traditional concepts of motherhood the collection offers a fresh and insightful examination of maternal narratives as transmitters of transgenerational trauma. Lamees Al Ethari and Maria Lombard’s finely curated volume investigates these pressing issues through diverse genres—personal stories, academic essays, visual art, and experimental poetry. Ultimately, by confirming and extending Marianne Hirsch’s landmark study of “postmemory,” this book sheds new light on modes of intergenerational traumatic transmission (such as epigenetic transfer and systemic racism) and on therapeutic narrative strategies for coping with the trauma passed down from mothers to daughters.
- Dr. Vikki Visvis, Department of English, University of Toronto
Introduction
Lamees Al Ethari and Maria Lombard
In Her Voice: Telling Maternal Stories of Intergenerational Trauma
Packing an Identity
Priscilla Jamal
Cut the Cord and Stay Far from Home: The Trauma of Maternal Cannibalism in the Novel and Series The Haunting of Hill House
Erica D. Galioto
“This Is My Story Now!” Trauma and Postmemory in Two Swedish Caregiving Narratives about Mothers and Daughters
Cecilia Pettersson
Hungry for Alternative Forms of Motherhood in Susan Abulhawa’s “Memories in an Un-Palestinian Story, in a Can of Tuna”
Jessica Sanfilippo-Schulz
An Exo-Autoethnography of Adoption Trauma in Mother/Daughter Relationships
Holly M. Wells
Motherhood in Crisis
Lamees Al Ethari
Racialized Motherhoods: Race, Displacement, and Intergenerational Trauma
Madness, Mayhem, and Motherhood: Matrilineal Misrecognition in Contemporary African American Fiction
Uzzie T. Cannon
Examining the Intergenerational Impact of Systemic Racism on African American Maternal and Child Health
Genevieve Deeken, Jennifer LoCasale-Crouch, and Joyice Robinson Myers
Ethical Relationality and Matriarchy in Helen Knott’s Memoirs, In My Own Moccasins and Becoming a Matriarch
Paige Sweeney
In Their Own Terms: Reinterpreting Vietnamese Refugee Motherhood through Second Generation Narratives
Justine Trinh
Unbury the Voices of Adoptees’ Birth Mothers in Kaneko Kazuyo's To Amy
Kaori Mori Want
Snapshots and Pixels: The Images and Imaginings of Motherhood
Modern Love; Mother Care
Rachelle Ymay Skilling
“Shot through with Holes”: Pearl Clutching & Female-Led Families
Kay Beckett & Evangeline (Vange) Holtz-Schramek
Photographs Not Taken
Martine McDonagh
Epitaph: Her Voice through a Photo
Maria D. Lombard
Where Am I?
Sumeyra Nurcan
Visualizing My Mother in Three Acts
Tonisha Taylor
Lamees Al Ethari is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her research and creative work focus on trauma and migration in women’s life narratives. She is the author of From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris (Baseline Press, 2018) and Waiting for the Rain: An Iraqi Memoir (Mawenzi House, 2019). She is a nonfiction editor with The New Quarterly and a co-founder of The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop for Immigrant Women.
Maria Lombard is the Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs at Northwestern University in Qatar. Her research focuses on writing studies, with interests in second-language writing pedagogy, minority and gendered voices, and travel writing. Her scholarly publications include refereed articles and proceedings, as well as book chapters, on belonging, displacement, and motherhood. Her most recent edited volume is Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood: Identity, Belonging, and Displacement in a Global Context (Lexington Books 2022).
