Amidst the control, confusion, and chaos caused by her eight-times-married mother, this authorâs story spans the extreme emotions of a mother-daughter relationship, touching on cyclical family dysfunction, addiction, and forgiveness.
Beginning at the age of five, Sondra spends decades auditioning for the role of her authentic self. Her dazzling mother casts her as confidante and co-conspirator in her affairs and serial marriages. Sondra vacillates between fierce anger toward her motherâwho does nothing to protect her from physical, sexual, and emotional abuseâand a desperate need for her love and approval.
As an adult, Sondra enters into and stays in a toxic marriage for years, engaging in affairs with married men rather than divorcing. When therapy and AA eventually propel her out of the sense-deadening haze of alcohol and cigarettes, she summons the courage to tell her husband she plans to leave him. He reacts by playing on her biggest fear, telling her, âYouâre going to turn out just like your mother.â
During this time, traumatic childhood memories suddenly surface and a seismic shift occurs, freeing Sondra from her need for maternal connection. But establishing a life independent from her mother proves far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Amidst the control, confusion, and chaos caused by her eight-times-married mother, this authorâs story spans the extreme emotions of a mother-daughter relationship, touching on cyclical family dysfunction, addiction, and forgiveness.
Beginning at the age of five, Sondra spends decades auditioning for the role of her authentic self. Her dazzling mother casts her as confidante and co-conspirator in her affairs and serial marriages. Sondra vacillates between fierce anger toward her motherâwho does nothing to protect her from physical, sexual, and emotional abuseâand a desperate need for her love and approval.
As an adult, Sondra enters into and stays in a toxic marriage for years, engaging in affairs with married men rather than divorcing. When therapy and AA eventually propel her out of the sense-deadening haze of alcohol and cigarettes, she summons the courage to tell her husband she plans to leave him. He reacts by playing on her biggest fear, telling her, âYouâre going to turn out just like your mother.â
During this time, traumatic childhood memories suddenly surface and a seismic shift occurs, freeing Sondra from her need for maternal connection. But establishing a life independent from her mother proves far more complicated than she could have imagined.
âWhat kind of daughter does such a thing?â Mom wailed.
I stood in the kitchen with the phone held away from
my ear. Never had I heard my mother shriek, not at anyone or
anything. I put the phone close to my ear again, ready to deliver
a defensive reply, but she continued.
âIâve tried to make a life here. Now everyone in town is going
to know my daughter hates me!â
âI donât hate you.â
âYes, you do. Any daughter who writes such things about her
mother has to hate her. She has to.â
âMom, I really donât think Iââ
âEven my attorney and priest looked at it and asked, âWhat is
this thing? What is it? What has your daughter done?ââ
I could only hope her intense anger might exhaust her a little.
I didnât have the courage to hang up on her. I didnât trust my
ability to come from a position of strength. I was in my fifties
but still afraid to fully test the Iâm-a-separate-person-from-my-mother
muscle.
âThis could destroy my court case! I guarantee you, itâs going
to be used as part of my character assassination,â she said.
âYou think their attorneys read my blog? You think people
are automatically found guilty based on blog posts someone
writes about them? Jesus, weâd all be in jail,â I said.
âOh, listen to you, talking like youâre a lawyer or something.â
I sighed.
âI have to go,â she said. âI have an appointment with my
priest, whoâs going to help me decide what to do about this.â
âOh,â I said. âYeah, okay.â
âSatan is trying to destroy my marriage!â she said and hung up.
A priestâone who had never even met meâwas to decide
whether my mother ever spoke to me again. More vexing perhaps
was how to defend myself against Satan, who, my mother
believed, used me as a pawn to destroy her marriage. I feared that
I, as a mere atheist mortal, might be a bit outgunned.
My motherâs humiliation and panic were due to her discovery
of a blog I started years ago called My Mother Committed Serial
Marriage. Iâd abandoned it after creating only a few posts and all
but forgot about its existence.
What kind of daughter does such a thing? My motherâs question
was a valid one. What kind indeed?
In Not Good Enough Girl: A Memoir of an Inconvenient Daughter, Sondra R. Brooks narrates her life story, starting in early childhood and using the chronology of her mother's eight marriages as a throughline. The scene outlined in the first part of the first chapter is a pivotal one of an adult Sondra talking to her mother on the phone - a scene that repeats itself later in the appropriate place on the timeline (not verbatim, which is a fantastic choice), but whose significance is much clearer after having absorbed the greater part of the story.
With painstaking honesty, even to the point of describing extremely uncomfortable scenes of neglect, physical and sexual abuse, emotional manipulation, and the effects of alcohol and drugs, Brooks takes us through her unusual life. Her complex relationship with her mother takes center stage - a beautiful, universally beloved woman with more marriages under her belt than Henry VIII. The same woman who could light up a room left her daughter waiting in parking lots for her to pick her up after practice, told her adult son what to wear, and stood by doing nothing as her children were being "disciplined" by their father du jour. She does so many contradictory things that it is impossible to pin her down as either a positive or a negative force in her daughter's life until you realize, along with Sondra, that she is actually both - just like any other person, except she takes it to the extreme.
One of the best features of this book is that Brooks doesn't approach her memoir writing as just stringing the highlights of her life together, aiming to entertain. There is such vulnerability and authenticity in her relating seemingly mundane details about her experiences, such as the decor of a diner or what her mother was wearing during a certain visit. These details not only ground the story in a time and place and show how anchored it is in her memory, but also give the unambiguous impression: this is the story of a real person's life, told through the lens of authentic human perception with all its flaws.
Unlike many other memoirs, this story feels less curated and more genuine - the patterns in the author's behavior or her mother's behavior emerge authentically, in the same order as one would process them upon reflection. Instead of connecting the dots for us or brandishing diagnoses or fancy psychological terms, she simply tells us what happened at a certain time and how it affected her.
Though at many moments throughout the book I was tempted to think: "I think your mother might have been a narcissist", the kind of reflection Brooks' writing seems to invite instead is more along the lines of: "My mother was a deeply complex person, with many reasons to love her and many reasons to hate her - here is how her influence shaped me into who I am and how I reclaimed my right to be my own person".
On paper, it would seem appropriate to devote the same amount of time to each of her mother's marriages, maybe even name the chapters after each of the men she married, but it's precisely that kind of subversion of expectation, order and precision that breathes life into Brooks' story. Real life doesn't work that way, some events impact us more than others, and a genuine account of what happened is never "clean" or symmetrical. Furthermore, her choice to tell the story on her terms, from her point of view, contrasting how she felt at the time of the events with what she learned from them upon reflection, must have been exceptionally empowering and therapeutic. The way the book is written makes it read like a masterclass of how structure and content work together to illustrate the non-linear processing of trauma, from exposition to catharsis.
Leading us through confusion, introspection, and ultimately to forgiveness, Sondra R. Brooks' memoir feels intimate, deeply moving, and undeniably genuine.