The Bad Daughter » (1 ED)

Julie Hilden was born in Teaneck, New Jersey in 1968. She graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in 1989 with degrees in Philosophy and English. She received her JD from Yale Law School in 1992. In 1995, she earned an MFA from Cornell University, where she studied with Alison Lurie. She now lives in Washington, D.C., where she works as a litigator practicing criminal defense and First Amendment law.

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.

Library Journal

When her mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, 22-year-old Hilden refused to do what her aunt Betty and society expected her to doquit law school and care for her now-incapacitated parent. Indeed, before her mother's death, Hilden visited her only once in the nursing home. Although the author expects readers to condemn her actions, she asks, "Would other people really have chosen to care for a mother who wasn't loving, who was often angry, who was often simply gone?" Hilden's brief memoir recalls her unhappy childhood with an alcoholic mother and her attempt to escape and create a new life. Ironically, Hilden, now 29, has a 50-50 chance of carrying the gene for early-onset Alzheimer's. While she raises some powerful issues (selfishness vs. self-preservation), her book is weakened by pretentious, "literary" prose and an unnecessarily long section explicitly detailing her sexual affairs. For collections where dysfunctional family memoirs are popular.Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"