All the lost girls

the long version

"Patricia Foster's memoir weaves together the life of a mother and daughter caught in the web of that mother's ambition. The mother, intelligent and driven, but trapped by a heartbreaking secret, is determined that her daughters receive the training that will guarantee their success as professional women. Foster and her sister are brought up as "honorary boys," girls with the ambition of men but the temperament of women, in rural south Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s.". "Foster's desire is to please her mother, but by the time she reaches age fifteen, her efforts to reconcile the contradictory expectations that she be both ambitious and restrained leave her nervous and needy even as she cultivates the appearance of the model student, sister, and daughter. All the Lost Girls charts the difficult unraveling the narrator must do to achieve understanding and autonomy."--BOOK JACKET.