It hit me like a ton of bricks : a memoir of a mother and daughter / Catherine Lloyd Burns.

For every reader, male or female, who has ever had a mother. The sole principle governing me through life was that everything wrong with me -- my behavior,my anxiety, my neuroses, all my misery: my entire personality, in other words -- was due to the fact that my mother was a hideous parent. I had lived completely certain of that one thing. And now,at middle age, when I have to contend with my skin sagging and my ass falling, I am also forced to face the fact that my mother loves me more than anyone else on the face of God's green earth and that we are bound by a connection that is supernatural and complete. She gave birth to me. She is my mother. I know what it means to love your child so much that everything prior to that is irrelevant and nonsensical. It has completely changed my idea of what being a daughter is. This book is a chronicle of that odyssey. Catherine Burns