Review: Mother Daughter Me by Katie Hafner

Dear Lit Lovies,
I am waiting to hear from literary agents and a publisher so in the meantime I have stocked up on my memoir reading library.  I just finished reading Mother Daughter Me by Katie Hafner yesterday evening.  I read this book, about three generations of women trying to coexist together after a history of bitter family turmoil, with intrigue.  I had to put the book down on several occasions because I kept getting disgusted with the major players in the story.  First, I have to say it's a gutsy move to attempt having your mom live with you and your teenage daughter.  In my experience, I have never seen this dynamic happen at any time in my life without disastrous consequences.  Given the author's erratic history with her mom, I have to say I thought her decision to invite her mom to reside with she and her daughter to be generous, but irrational.  The interesting and often hysterical parts of this book occur when the author and her mother both attempt to achieve a sense of peace by going to therapy.....................together.   It was at this point in the book when I said to myself this is not going to end well.  I found the author's upbringing to be tragic.  Her mom came across as quite self-absorbed and that's putting it mildly.  The father who I believe was a college dean appeared disaffected by the whole concept of family.  He is a college dean, but when it comes time for his daughter to go to college, he vows that he doesn believe in college.  And he surely doesn't want to help pay for the college education of his two daughters.  Honestly, I don't know why the author even tried with either parent after she became an adult.  I would have high-tailed it away from both parents and never looked back.
I felt the most sympathy for the author's sister who appears to have fallen through the cracks in life and no one bothered to care, much less help her.  This sister was probably bipolar even though the author never identifies it as such; however, given the nature of her upbringing I am surprised that she coped as well as she did.  I absolutely could not stand the doctor who the author is dating.  Yes, he listens, has dry humor, and makes a decent living, but as soon as I found out that he kept spreadsheets on each of the women he dated in order to obviously keep them straight, I was seething and pronouncing him an anal-retentive jerk.  The author's daughter appears to be initially put in the middle of a war zone and she wisely makes the decision that she will not engage herself in the passivie-aggressive battles going on between her mother and grandmother.  She does do what many teenagers are very good at doing and that is pulling the wool over an adult's eyes. Forgive me, but I saw a lot of teenage surprises coming before the mother ever did not because I am a mom, but because I have taught teenagers.  I was left wondering though that even eight years after her father's death if she had really dealt with the bitter reality of what losing him cost her.  I kept wondering if, after this author did not have the opportunity to benefit from psychotherapy during her precarious upbringing, why did she not go get the best psychotherapist for her daughter?  The ending of the book left me with more questions than answers so if you are expecting a tidy closure, don't hold your breath.