Mother-Daughter Banquet: A Memoir

The memoir Mother-Daughter Banquet explores the concept of motherhood. After losing her mother at the age of nine, Alice Bloch becomes a surrogate mother to her four younger siblings. In turn, a formidable triumvirate of grandmother, stepmother, and aunt step into the maternal role to fill the void in Bloch's development as a woman and as a writer. Diving deep into her specific memories of growing up as a Jewish lesbian in mid-twentieth-century Ohio, Bloch reaches for universal truths about the mother-daughter bond. Mother-Daughter Banquet untangles the knot of memory and finds the thread of love and reconciliation.