Edelman, Hope

Hope Edelman is an American writer and author. She is the author of five books on motherhood: Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss (1994), Letters From Motherless Daughters: Word of Courage, Grief, and Healing (1995), Mother of My Mother: The Intricate Bond Between Generations, (1997), Motherless Mothers: How Losing a Mother Shapes the Parent You Become (2006), and her memoir, The Possibility of Everything (2009). Edelman lost her own mother in 1981 to breast cancer. Edelman, who was 17 at the time, has drawn on that experience for her books.

Edelman grew up with her two younger siblings in Spring Valley, New York, about 30 minutes from her maternal grandparent's home in Mount Vernon, New York. She graduated from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1986. She was educated in researching, interviewing, and editing for newspapers, but found that the inverted pyramid of newspaper journalism was of interest to her. A professor suggested she try magazine writing, which places more emphasis on facts and details. Edelman earned a master's degree in expository writing from the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program.

While in college, Edelman interned at the Chicago-based Outside magazine. She later worked for three months writing for the Salem Statesman Journal, where she wrote news and feature articles. Once she graduated, Edelman went on to work for Whittle Communications in Knoxville, Tennessee, for three years. Edelman began writing Motherless Daughters while she was a student at the University of Iowa, after Professor Mary Swander encouraged Edelman to dig into and write about her feelings surrounding her mother's death. In the book, Edelman explorers her own inability to grieve her mother's death for years, as well as the experiences of other daughters who lost their mothers. She was 29 when it was published in 1994, and it became a New York Times bestseller within two months, having since been published in eight languages. Her second book, Letters From Motherless Daughters, published a year later, contains letters from readers who had lost their mothers and were touched by Edelman's writing in her first book. She organized the letters by how long it had been since their mother had died.

Edelman's third book, Mother of My Mother (1997), explores the relationships between women, their mothers, and their grandmothers, many of whom Edelman interviewed and surveyed, while dismissing paternal grandmothers. Critics reviewed the book as a mix of scientific findings and memoir with an uneven presentation. It was published in 1999, three years after Edelman's grandmother passed away.

In Edelman's fourth Book, Motherless Mothers, she explores how women who have lost their own mothers draw on that experience when mothering their own children. She has said that the idea for the book came to her while she was pregnant with her second child and on bed rest. In an interview with http://www.LiteraryMama.com, she said that had her mother been living, she would have phoned for help in day-to-day house upkeep and care of her then four-year-old daughter. However, she was forced to find other ways to cope. The book took three years to write, in part due to Edelman's desire not to leave her children motherless while she wrote. Further, her father passed away while she was writing, and Edelman took time off from the book to spend with him during his final months.

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