Reading Jane, Susannah Kennedy
Reading Jane, Susannah Kennedy
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Reading Jane
A Daughter's Memoir

Author: Susannah Kennedy

Narrator: Marnye Young

Unabridged: 9 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/26/2023


Synopsis

A gripping memoir that shows what freedom looks like when we choose to examine the uncomfortable past

Jane is to the world a charismatic personality—opinionated, an inner-city teacher and public activist, a lover of Italy, proud and successful—who thrives on a carefully crafted life narrative. Susannah, her beautiful only daughter and her intended protégé, senses the stricter, darker truth, and fights to resist the control imposed on her by her mother's narcissistic tale, especially as Susannah becomes a mother herself.

But then Jane at seventy-five, healthy and fit, chooses suicide, leaving her daughter with grief and the unwelcome gift of forty-five years of hidden diaries. Daring to "read" Jane after her death is like unlatching Pandora's Box. For a year, Susannah twists and turns to the truths she uncovers, comparing what she remembers with what her mother put down in words. As Susannah Kennedy relives her life through her mother's eyes, she grapples with the ties between mothers and daughters and the choices parents make.

About Susannah Kennedy

Berkeley and Oxford-educated anthropologist Susannah Kennedy was born in India and raised in the United States. Later, she traveled extensively on her own, first in Italy, and then through the Middle East and India, settling for two years in Egypt before becoming a reporter in Dallas, Texas. At Oxford University, she specialized in Arab culture and politics, receiving her DPhil in social anthropology. She and her psychoanalyst husband lived and worked in Germany, raising three children in a thatched-roof farmhouse in the countryside outside Hamburg. Her mother's suicide and its aftermath brought them back to Santa Cruz, California in 2017. They now reside in Marin County.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Beverly on April 14, 2024

This was a very thought proving book. I focused on the mother-daughter relationship spirals. It also raised issues of suicide, domestic Violence, women’s roles and how we evolve.......more

Goodreads review by JUDITH DONOVAN on September 29, 2023

Life and death with a narcissist Kennedy's story takes us in and out of her mother's conscientiously daily diaries covering 45 years. Moments described by her mother as experienced by her daughter are vivid and evocative. Jane and her diaries raise provocative ideas of control, death, and narcissism......more

Goodreads review by Shellie on June 10, 2023

Susannah Kennedy has a doctorate in social anthropology. At times, while reading her memoir, it felt as if she were approached her mother and their relationship as a case study in human behavior. This is not a criticism. It is to say that Kennedy’s education and training come through on the page. In......more

Goodreads review by Michelle on July 26, 2023

Reading Jane A Daughter's Memoir by Susannah Kennedy Pub Date 05 Sep 2023 | Archive Date 04 Sep 2023 Sibylline Press Biographies & Memoirs| Nonfiction \(Adult\)| Parenting & Families Netgalley and Sibylline Press have provided me with a copy of Reading Jane for review: Initially, I want to say that this wa......more

Goodreads review by Kimberly on February 11, 2024

One’s relationship with his/her parent will resound all throughout life. This memoir, Reading Jane, by Susannah Kennedy explores just that, the memories, effect, and trauma of a relationship between a child and her mother. Interestingly enough, Ms. Kennedy explores this relationship through the read......more