My Mother's Daughter: A Memoir.

Julie Rekai Rickerd is a Toronto broadcaster and public relations
consultant.

Mother-daughter relationships are fraught with difficulties at the best of times. Rona Maynard’s account of her love-hate relationship with her family in general and her mother in particular is a no-holds-barred expose of her extremely creative but disruptive background.

Frustration reigned in her family. Her mother, Fredelle Maynard, rebelled against her own domineering Jewish mother by marrying her University of Manitoba English professor, many years her senior, and the son of Plymouth Brethren missionaries. Despite a Ph.D. in English literature from Radcliffe, and the fact that her husband had only a B.A., it was Max Maynard who was appointed to teach at the University of New Hampshire while Fredelle looked after their hearth and home. All Fredelle’s energy went into her homemaker role; she was renowned for her superb decorating, cooking, sewing, and housekeeping. In her “spare time” she wrote for women’s magazines, was the ghostwriter of Dr. Joyce Brothers’ syndicated advice column, and endured the never-ending challenges of her alcoholic professor/artist husband and two daughters.

Rona resented everything and everyone, especially her parents and her younger sister, Joyce, whom she deemed prettier and more loved by her mother than she. Most of all she resented her own desperate search for her mother’s approval at all times, both as a child and an adult, despite the fact that she abhorred her micromanagerial hold on her life.

The self-exploration in Maynard’s deeply personal memoir is interspersed with interesting and informative family history: the immigration of her penniless, Jewish maternal great-grandparents to Manitoba to escape the Cossacks, her paternal grandparents’ missionary service in India, her father’s sketching outings with Emily Carr and Jack Shadbolt in Victoria, her sister Joyce’s brief but intense relationship with J.D. Salinger.

Despite the Sturm und Drang of their family years and the divorce of the parents, the Maynards not only survived but eventually all excelled in their respective creative fields. Rona, herself, has had a stellar career as a magazine writer and editor that culminated in her 10-year editorship of Chatelaine. With frankness, courage, and honesty, she tells a story to which most mothers and daughters will instantly relate.