Places to Look for a Mother

the long version

"She's Miriam Taylor, Lucy and Jen Taylor's mother, and until the divorce, Bob Taylor's wife. A force of nature. To know her is to love her, to love her is to hate her. She's a woman who changes her name according to the ethnic flavor of the month, dabbles in Mormonism, and steals cleaning supplies from restaurant bathrooms. She is beautiful, excitable, contradiction as art form. She's the kind of mom who reads her daughter's diary, serves ketchup soup for dinner, and drags her girls from Utah to California to Wyoming in pursuit of one loser boyfriend after another. Her love for her daughters is fierce, smothering, neglectful. "There is no other way than her. Does that sound extravagant? Or should I say there is no other place than her," observes Lucy, the endearing narrator of this very special debut novel." "Places to Look for a Mother tells a tale of mostly maddening mother-daughter bonds. Forgiveness is always there, but it's hard to find. And the Taylor family usually loses it. With lithe prose, pitch-perfect dialogue, and gloriously real characters, author Nicole Stansbury conjures a family that proves Tolstoy right once again: All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The Taylors are no exception of course: four people bound by blood and a unique emotional alchemy of love, loathing, and striving that resounds with echoes of all families everywhere."--BOOK JACKET.