Although Jane Lazarre’s remarkable memoir of her first years of motherhood was published nearly 30 years ago, the resonance — and relevance — of her story has barely faded. In The Mother Knot, Lazarre writes unsparingly of “the strange and paradoxical way in which the infinite kind of love we feel for our children is locked into the dull, enervating routine of caring for them,” and of her personal struggle to liberate enough solitude and time from the steady pull of marriage and motherhood to honor her own creative drive. In her more recent works, which include the 1991 novel Worlds Beyond My Control and the memoir Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness (1999), Lazarre continues to use the lens of motherhood to expand the themes of attachment and separation, self and other, Blackness and whiteness, silence and the power of truth.

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