Disobedient Memories: My Hidden Childhood Revealed

Disobedient Memories: My Hidden Childhood Revealed is a memoir in which the author revisits her childhood through the lens of her mother's letters and diaries, which often indicate a reality divergent from her own memories. It reveals a childhood shaped by anxiety and her mother's desire to control her, often through corporal punishment. Set in Philadelphia from 1943-1963, McKaughan covers her parent's relationship and strict adherence to the cocktail hour and candlelight dinners served by a maid, her mother's many mood swings and lack of self-control, and how she handled, on her own, the constant worry caused by her father's heart disease. It paints a world of a small child in which it was hard to trust the people who should have been caring for her, and how the stew helped create the woman she became. Molly McKaughan is the author of four other books: The Biological Clock: Balancing Marriage, Motherhood and Career, for which she interviewed more than one hundred women about their struggles to decide whether or not to have a baby as time ran out; Recovering Myself: A Memoir in Poetry, which details her journey to sobriety as she becomes a woman who no longer needs to go through life with a bottle in one hand and a man in the other; Behind Their Backs, a novel about two suburban couples in 1955 whose lives become darkly intertwined-a story of adultery, alcoholism, domestic violence, and, ultimately, redemption; and Dear Miss Terranova: Correspondence Between a Father and Daughter at College, 1963-66, which document her unique relationship with her father.