Mothers, Fathers, and Others. Essays

Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in the new essay collection from Siri Hustvedt, described as " a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf " (Literary Review, UK). Man Booker-longlisted Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect in her most intimate and probing collection of essays yet. Hustvedt moves effortlessly between stories of her mother, grandmother, and daughter to artistic mothers, including Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Louise Bourgeois, to the broader meaning of the maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority.
Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a polymath's journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art. This moving book is an exploration of the boundaries we usually take for granted - between ourselves and others, nature and nurture, viewer and artwork - which are far less stable than we imagine. Ultimately, it is about the dangers of drawing hard and fast borders where none exist.