From the author of the best-selling The Mother Zone, comes a candid narrative about an over-anxious mother and her twenty-something over-adventurous son.
Home Free is about the last secret lap of parenting: getting through your kids” twenties and learning how to let them go at the same time. The twentysomethings who invented the generation gap in the nineteen sixties have grown up to become hyperinvolved parents who can”t stop worrying about their adult kids.
Many of the kids are still living in the basement, bussing tables instead of going to business school, and depending on their parents for emotional support. Just when they thought family life was on the wane, parents are back on deck with their children; at the same time many are often coping with
their own frail or dying parents.
Is this the new, improved face of family, where kids still depend on their parents for stability, friendship and guidance in an increasingly unforgiving world? Or has this era of over-invested parents, living vicariously through the achievements of their children, bred dependency in the new generation?
Home Free is an intimate, candid, reflective and comic memoir that focuses on this new and undefined stage of family life: the challenges of helping our kids navigate their twenties-while learning how to let go of them at the same time.
They invented the generation gap in the 1960s. Now it’s closing in on them, as they become hyper-involved with their own adult kids. Just when they thought their job was done, parents are fretting about their grown children—often while coping with their own frail parents.
Marni Jackson’s intimate and witty memoir explores an untold rite of passage: the last lap of parenting. Home Free offers ground-breaking insights into navigating your kids’ twenties, and learning to let go.
To read excerpts from Home Free, please go to www.walrusmagazine.com (“The Boomerang Effect”) and www.macleans.ca (“Motherhood: The Third Act”).
A compulsively readable explorer’s journal of the hidden territory of pain, as profound and insightful as the work of Oliver Sacks and Sherwin Nuland.
A bee sting on the lips was the tiny lance that set Marni Jackson off on a four-year exploration of the many ways in which we suffer. Exiled for an afternoon in the country called pain, she realized that no one had the words to describe her condition although it was as familiar as a headache. A fusion of emotion, nerve and memory, pain inspired only questions.
“Why do we still distinguish between mental pain and physical pain,” she asks, “when pain is always an emotional experience? Why is pain so poorly understood, especially in a century of self-scrutiny? Hasn’t anyone noticed the embarrassing fact that science is about to clone a human being but still can’t cure the pain of a bad back?” North Americans spend $24 billion a year on pain relief while chronic pain is on the rise. If pain is the reason why most people visit the doctor, why are most doctors so bad at addressing the problem of suffering?
Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign dives back into the history of pain and forward into the possibilities of pain genetics, bringing us stories of both people in pain and the pain pioneers: eccentrics and artists, wrestlers and writers, ministers and mothers, psychologists and philosophers, nurses and doctors. Marni Jackson has created a definitive, heartfelt, funny and beguiling portrait of a condition we can’t live with – and can’t live without.
“A bouquet of empirical opinions and reminiscences of about all the many small moments that make up the mothering process.”
Sunday Globe
“Humourous, frank and passionate… Entertaining and gutsy, her account will warn and console parents.”
Publishers Weekly
“A wonderful memoir of what motherhood is really like…fun to read, eye-opening, humourous and exasperating.”
Library Journal
“[A]n exuberant, generous-hearted book about the experience of motherhood and the impact of that experience on her life and work … The writing is intelligent, reflective and touchingly brave … Jackson possesses a novelist’s eye and ear.”
Carol Shields, The Globe and Mail
“An intimate look at an evolving relationship and a startlingly honest self-portrait of an intelligent woman growing older and wiser….Jackson makes a major contribution towards restoring the dignity that mothering children deserves.”
Maclean’s
“A witty and honest account of the strange isolation, the mingled joys and madness of motherhood…funny, tough and relentless, pushing each thought as far as she can bear.”
The Toronto Star
“Truly one of the most enjoyable reads of the season…Jackson makes the pages crackle in the manner of Fay Weldon or Nora Ephron.”
ROB Magazine
“You’ve got to read The Mother Zone. ”
Kingston Whig-Standard
“A terrific book…Jackson concocts a refreshing tonic out of the comedy of errors we call family life…a treat for weary parents of either sex.”
Quill & Quire
“Delightful…funny, touching, reassuring, a revelation. The Mother Zone is a marvelous combination of personal experience tempered by intellectual observation… flashes of recognition occur on every page…a must-read for all modern mothers.”
Books in Canada
“I was hooked…Jackson’s writing is so succinct, so perceptive and flows so easily that it keeps the reader enthralled…her themes are so universal that anyone who has ever been a mother, had a mother, knows a mother, will know exactly what she’s talking about.”
Kitchener-Waterloo Record
“It reads like a novel, as intimate as a poem…With a gift for metaphor, good humour, and remarkably honesty [Jackson] calls up the feelings and minutiae of motherhood…This wonderful self-portrait of emotional life in the mother zone provides solace and surprises from start to finish.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A worthy companion to Dr. Spock on every parent’s bookshelf.”
Chatelaine
“It is hard to find anything that conveys the complex emotional truth about being a mother – the rage, the tenderness, the loss of self, the paralyzing fear, the numbing drudgery…The exception may be Marni Jackson’s new book, The Mother Zone… This book, with its humour, depth and compassion, could be a long-overdue manifesto for mothers, the beginning of an undeclared revolution.”
Ottawa Citizen
“Irresistibly funny… Poignant insight and a style that lured me to read the thing at stoplights… Drop all your preconceived ideas about mothering at the front cover… Marni Jackson’s first-hand account of motherhood deserves a category all its own.”
Charlotte Observer
“Jackson is truthful and hits female feelings right on the head.”
Calgary Herald
“The Mother Zone is filled with the kind of insights you’ll never get from Dr. Spock… Jackson is by turns tender and ruthless, unashamedly sentimental and fearlessly self-mocking… Her observations are often hilarious.”
Family Practice
“Reading Jackson’s book was like a re-run of my own alternatively dark and euphoric thoughts, only put in extremely eloquent, poignant, why-didn’t-I-say-that language.”
Victoria Times-Colonist
“You can be a sensitive male and motherhood will still be the dark side of the moon. This book takes you there.”
NOW Magazine
“Jackson gives readers back to themselves, the best thing a book can do.”
Edmonton Journal
From the author of the best-selling The Mother Zone, comes a candid narrative about an over-anxious mother and her twenty-something over-adventurous son.