A wise and involving book about feminine thresholds, spiritual growth, and renewal, "Traveling with Pomegranates" is a revealing self-portrait by the beloved author of "The Secret Life of Bees" and her daughter, a writer in the making.

In 1949, four Chinese women--drawn together by the shadow of their past--begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club--and forge a relationship that binds them for more than three decades.

Traces the rewards and pitfalls of a Chinese mother's exercise in extreme parenting, describing the exacting standards applied to grades, music lessons, and avoidance of Western cultural practices.

"Award-winning actresses and mother-daughter duo Laura Dern and Diane Ladd are the kind of women who draw strength from their lifelong friendships with other women, and most of all, from each other. Ever since Laura was born, the two have leaned on each other through the trials of everyday life and the tribulations that come with even the most storied Hollywood careers. They were always close, but when Diane developed a sudden illness, their relationship...

The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's memoir of the year she and her mother Helen spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Katie urged Helen, set in her ways at 77, to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie's teenage daughter. Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and her mother would become friends, and that Helen would...

When her daughter runs away to her aunt in California, Merritt Fowler of Georgia takes a plane to bring her back, the trip a welcome change from a demanding husband and an equally demanding mother-in-law who is suffering from Alzheimer's. The scene is set for a steamy romance during an earthquake.

"Mom, I'm gay." With three little words, gay children can change their parents' lives forever. Yet at the same times it's a chance for those parents to realize nothing, really, has changed at all; same kid, same life, same bond of enduring love.

Twenty years ago, during a walk on a Mississippi beach, Ellen DeGeneres spoke those simple, powerful words to her mother. That emotional moment eventually brought mother and daughter

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"At nineteen Trethewey's world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma. Here she explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a 'child of miscegenation' in Mississippi,...

"A daughter's tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity"--

"A darkly funny and devastating memoir of growing up in '90s Manhattan with a mentally ill single parent"--