"Recommended for Women's Studies collections"

--LIBRARY JOURNAL

"Shields' psychoanalytic sessions provide a neat framework on which to hang her developing understanding... a complex study - engrossing and rewarding."

--KIRKUS REVIEWS

"A humane and authentic book written by another voice from the trenches."

--JOANNE GREENBERG

--I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

"Here is the story of a woman who refuses to remain a victim. Mary Lou Shields is more than a survivor. She goes back to the pain, the raw need, the frightening world of the abused child to emerge at last with insight, strength and love. She writes with an honesty at once lacerating and healing of
her nightmares, her sexuality, her fears. With an equal openness she shows us herself as a daughter and as mother, as friend and as lover, and above all as a woman learning to trust and respect herself."

--MARGE PIERCY

--Gone to Soldiers and Small Changes

Memoirs of a feminist daughter

"The undertow of the autobiography and the motivating force for the author's five years of psychoanalysis is her fear that she will repeat her mother's experience and slip into mental illness"

"...The dialogue is remarkably fresh, since the book has been drawn from many years of journals, and a lot of it concerns what passes between Shields and her analyst, whose assumptions she passes thru the fiery furnaces of her new found feminism even as he is analyzing her. Gradually Shields' ferocious ideology is chastened by the events and relationships in her life. "Surviving her mother's madness," the subtitle of the book, comes to mean that she manages to love and accept her mother and to accept their similarities. The book is at times pithy and painful, at times sweet."

--Mopsy Strange Kennedy

--The Boston Globe Magazine