In Memoir “The End of Eve,” Ariel Gore Breaks Down Myths About Moms and Daughters, by Sarah Maria Medina for Bitch Media
Like many, people I discovered writer Ariel Gore when another mother handed me her beloved first edition of The Hip Mama Survival Guide. She said something like, “Here, you’ll need this.” And she was right. I needed someone to tell me what was really going on with the beautiful, ridiculous path of motherhood that I was about to embark upon. The book became my companion as my hair turned into a perpetual bird nest and my belly swelled until my clothes no longer fit. Hip Mama was raw and honest and by the end I felt like Ariel was a close friend. Her new memoir, The End of Eve, seals that friendship. In the book, Ariel writes in vulnerable detail, breaking through societal maternal roles to speak a painful truth.
In the memoir, Gore tells the story of caring for her abusive mother, Eve, as her lungs succumb to cancer. Gore takes simple scenes and transmutes them into gold. The memoir is full of divine messages, ravens, and alchemic moments: a blue lake on her road trip from Portland to New Mexico, for example, becomes symbolic of destruction and hope. One telling passage reads: “I just wanted to sit by myself in my own little kitchen, barefoot and writing feminist books and psychology blogs, but somehow I was still wearing my purple corduroys–tending wounds and feeding people.”
The End of Eve is more than a memoir; it is a new Bible of sorts, a book we can turn to when things get thick. Gore questions the role of woman as caretaker even as she takes on the task and the story that unfolds challenges the archetype of nurse-daughter.
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