Review: Ophelia's Mom, by Nina Shandler

Nina Shandler is the mother of Sara Shandler, the nineteen year-old author of 'Ophelia Speaks', in which teenagers speak out about their lives and relationships with parents, friends, and others; Sara's book was itself a response to the widely popular Reviving Ophelia, a study of teenage girls. Nina Shandler (referred to going forward as simply Shandler) is herself a psychologist, and saw that a piece was missing from the Ophelia puzzle, that of the mothers' perspective on adolescence. Her work, Ophelia's Mom, is subtitled, 'women speak out about loving and letting go of their adolescent daughters', and that is exactly what it is.

Shandler sent out 23,000 fliers both online and on paper for mothers of teenage girls to submit thoughts and be interviewed for her book; she received only 350 responses, far less than her daughter had two years prior from the teenage contingent. Her explanation of this difference is partly that women are more secretive about family strife because they still generally bear the responsibility for running the family, and are humiliated by any perceived failure. Shandler used roughly half the responses she received in the book, but gave no information on how these particular responses were selected for use, or reasons why others would have been rejected. The responses she does use seem very homogeneous, and while I can't be certain whether this indicative of the larger response or a bias in selection of the responses for use, the copy of the invitation she used that is included in the forward could be a clue as to why; it is strongly geared towards a certain type of respondent. The wording of the invite uses fairly elevated diction, assumes that the person reading the flier has read Hamlet or at least has a working knowledge of who Ophelia is, and has either read at least one of the other two 'Ophelia' research works or knows enough about them to understand why this new work is pertinent. Although it attempts to be folksy, it's a fairly formal invitation, and not one that would appeal to very educationally or economically diverse audience.

Still, Shandler doesn't claim to have done a scientific study, merely to have gathered a series of anecdotal tales provided by women who have had experiences in typical, general teenage parenting categories - body image, parent-teen relationships, adult relationships surrounding teen issues, and letting their daughters go to graduation and life. The stories themselves are very absorbing, and swerve between heartwarming and heartbreaking. Walking through adolescence the first time was for many women difficult at best, and going through it a second time, this time as a bystander watching a beloved child struggle, is sometimes torturous. The women's experiences are told with humor and affection, and flow well into one another. Shandler limits herself to writing short personal stories at the beginning of new sections or where appropriate to bridge gaps between others' stories, which is a major bonus to the book; she understands that her role is not to judge failings or extol virtues, but rather to report experiences in the hopes that other women will relate and find comfort in not being alone. She does this very well, and seemingly without holding back her own embarrassment.

I'm not sure about Shandler's claim about women not writing in because they were shy or embarrassed. People not having problems wouldn't have written just to say, 'hey, everything's great over here, thanks for asking', so it's still hard to support her claim. However, as she also says, there is almost nothing out there like this book, stories from mothers about parenting their daughters in adolescence, and the book's true value stems from that. It's a well-written, extremely engaging book that provides insight and, importantly, hindsight into parenting ideas and struggles, particularly for those of us who are teetering on the edge of the adolescent phase for our second time around.

Rating: four stars; Well-written, chatty, touching look into parenting girls through the most difficult part of childhood