T A B L E++T A L K

BY KATE MOSES
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Mothers cast a potent spell. Whether yours failed you or not, you will try to get away, and she will reel you back, yo-yo-like, from unexpected corners of your life. Good god, it's her, you'll think when some weirdly familiar yet alien swatch of babble comes tumbling out of your mouth as you speak to your children. Or her face will materialize for a flickering second in the silvered light of the mirror as you turn to leave the room. It's not magic -- it's just your mom: your role model, your first love, your blueprint to womanhood, the stone you can never get out of your shoe.

It's a hard job being a mother, and not everyone is up to it, even if they'd like to be. Which is why so many of us spend years dissecting our mother's frailties and faults with our friends and mates and therapists. But would you feel justified or fair in writing down the story of your mother's stab at motherhood for any stranger (or worse, her friends and neighbors) to read?

Most of us adhere to an accepted code of family loyalty and live privately with our experiences and our hard-won insights. Now, however, the new age of literary memoir -- heralded by Mary Karr's fiercely honest, unapologetically loyal "Liar's Club," a reminiscence, at its heart, about her mother -- has joined the prevailing tide of cultural self-examination and made it acceptable, even fashionable, for writers to take their family skeletons by the hand and lead them out of the closet and onto the page. (Acceptable for the reading public, that is; what the mothers think may be a different story.)

The moms caught on paper in five recent memoirs by daughters -- NPR correspondent Jacki Lyden, poet Mary Karr and novelists Kathryn Harrison, Jamaica Kincaid and Linda Gray Sexton -- are not your run-of-the-mill specimens. In fact, they are a rather horrific lot, which makes these books a good test case for the possibility of, to paraphrase Wordsworth, recollecting daughterhood in tranquillity. If these daughters survived, so, with our mostly garden-variety mothers, might the rest of us.

What they survived was none too pretty: a mother so spectacularly insane that she thought she was the queen of Sheba, complete with eye-pencil hieroglyphics scribbled up her bare arms (Lyden's "Daughter of the Queen of Sheba"); an alcoholic mother so tormented by secrets and loss that she tried to kill her children and married seven times (Karr's "The Liar's Club"); a mother so withholding that her daughter started an affair with her father, both to punish her mother and to get her attention (Harrison's "The Kiss"); a mother so mysteriously powerful, cruel and uncaring that her children consider her "evil" and call her "Mrs. Drew," her married name, and will not eat the food she makes (Kincaid's "My Brother"); a mentally ill mother so self-absorbed and lacking in restraint that she sexually abused her young daughter (Sexton's "Searching for Mercy Street").

All five of these mothers have certain traits and circumstances in common: All were considered by their daughters (who now range in age from their mid-30s to mid-40s) to be attractive, smart, even gifted, and all five found their dreams thwarted in some way -- whether through culturally accepted sexism or romantic disappointment or poverty or small-town backwardness. Remarkably, despite having experienced childhoods of sometimes nauseating trauma and violence and fear, these daughters -- with the qualified exception of Harrison -- have written books that are honest, fair and free both of self-pity and vindictiveness. Somehow, the power of their first love for their mothers, flawed and handicapped as those mothers were, prevails.

N E X T+P A G E: "Her madness was our narrative line"