A good daughter takes care of her mother. A good daughter puts her own needs aside and stays with her mother if she becomes ill. Julie Hilden knows this. But she chooses to become a bad daughter instead: She abandons her mother and fails to return even when her mother becomes terminally ill. It is a choice she makes knowingly and without apology.
THE BAD DAUGHTER is Julie Hilden's haunting story. As a child, Hilden uses books to escape her mother's bewildering rages and silent retreats. When her college acceptance letter comes, she flees - for good. And as Hilden builds the foundation for a new life - college, law school, and beyond - her mother's life is coming to an end.
Still, even as she attempts to escape the past, Hilden find that it nevertheless comes back to her. With an unblinking eye, she describes the patterns of abandonment and deceit that comet to mark her new life. And each of her relationships, she finds, is influenced, tainted in some way, by her betrayal of her mother.
"Would other people have chosen a desertion so complete, so absolute? Was it simply a selfish choice? Pr was it, rather, self-preservation? This personal story - sad and provocative, exquisitely written and compelling - resonates for any of us who have tried to reinvent ourselves, any of us who fear being stifled by familial responsibility.
In a final and chilling irony, Hilden learns there is a strong chance, that she, too, carries the gene for early-onset Alzheimer's - the disease that killed her mother - and that she might suffer the same terrifying death.
