Kim Chernin

Psychotherapy is not just an abstract concept and cannot be described without reference to real human beings. So this book is also a story about people; in particular, two men who knew trauma, loneliness, and sometimes, despair. They dealt with their pain in some of the ways that people do: drinking, anger, disparaging others, and withdrawal from all but the safest of people. This, but for one element, would be a story of tragedy. The element that redeems the story was their use of their pain, uncertainty, and loneliness to help other suffering people.

In My Mother’s House depicts a profound, intergenerational struggle between a powerful, politically engaged mother, Rose, and her spiritually inclined poet and writer daughter, Kim. Framing this collision are two other generations. There is Rose’s mother from the shtetl, a broken woman regularly beaten by her husband but the source of the family’s stories. And Kim’s daughter, a second-generation, fully assimilated girl of eight at the time the book begins. Four generations, from the shtetl to an affluent intellectual household in Berkeley, California, the story is a historical record and reckoning between the old activist left and a beginning feminist movement. The double narrative allows Kim to explore the evolving relationship between mother and daughter, who, through their storytelling, are brought to a profound understanding and reconciliation.

Psychotherapy is not just an abstract concept and cannot be described without reference to real human beings. So this book is also a story about people; in particular, two men who knew trauma, loneliness, and sometimes, despair. They dealt with their pain in some of the ways that people do: drinking, anger, disparaging others, and withdrawal from all but the safest of people. This, but for one element, would be a story of tragedy. The element that redeems the story was their use of their pain, uncertainty, and loneliness to help other suffering people.

Kim Chernin's mother was a leftist firebrand, an American Marxist at mid-century, when it was dangerous to be one. Her father, a quiet man, was no less radical. Why then, decades later, does their daughter--a liberal California psychoanalyst and writer--find herself drawn toward a spirituality that would have shocked her parents? Through three personal stories, Chernin tackles the questions that pull at all of us: how to make sense in a world whose order isn't always apparent, and how to find balance between the mind and the spirit. "Kim Chernin writes with immediacy and intimacy."--City Life, London.

The Obsession is a deeply committed and beautifully written analysis of our society's increasing demand that women be thin. It offers a careful, thought provoking discussion of the reasons men have encouraged this obsession and women have embraced it. It is a book about women's efforts to become thin rather than to accept the natural dimensions of their bodies--a book about the meaning of food and its rejection.