By Her Own Hand: Memoirs of a Suicide's Daughter - Hardcover

Hammer, Signe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0939149494 ISBN 13: 9780939149490

Publisher: Soho Pr Inc, 1991

Synopsis

The author reflects on her struggle--as well as the struggle of her family--to cope in the aftermath of her mother's suicide, painting a poignant portrait of a nine-year-old plagued by guilt

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

A chronicle of emotional child abuse, Hammer's slim autobiography is a courageous attempt at tracing the root causes of her mother's and her own chronic depression. In the spring of 1950, while the author and her three older brothers slept and their overbearingly misogynistic father was out of town, her mother "set up the ironing board in front of the open oven, turned on the gas, lay down on the ironing board, and waited for the gas to do its work." Only nine years old at the time of the suicide, Hammer ( Passionate Attachments ) has spent a lifetime battling her own urges to follow in her mother's footsteps, and this work is clearly an exercise in survivor therapy. Through somewhat detached and at times poetically pretentious prose, Hammer paints a tragic picture of her family's pathological--and seemingly generational--need for control and the heart-wrenching consequences.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Pr Inc
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0939149494
• ISBN 13: 9780939149490
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200