The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson

Flap copy from ARC:

"Five years ago, after an exhaustive nationwide search, the Chicago Tribune announced Amy Dickinson as the next Ann Landers. They wanted a contemporary voice and they found it. Bracingly witty and candid, Amy is not your mother's advice columnist. Readers love her for her brutal honesty, her small-town values, and the fact that her motto is 'I make the mistakes so you don't have to.' Her advice column "Ask Amy," appears daily in more than 150 newspapers nationwide, read by more than 22 million people. In The Mighty Queens of Freeville, Amy Dickinson takes those mistakes and spins them into a remarkable story. This is the tale of Amy and her daughter and the women in her family who helped raise them."

This memoir was wonderful - once I started reading I couldn't put it down. Dickinson's candid, no-nonsense prose is at once honest, touching and punctuated with hilarity, and her stories of female resilience are achingly real.

The story follows Dickinson from her divorce (when her daughter Emily is a toddler) to Emily's freshman year of college and catalogues the wide and varied lessons they learned together along the way. It's not a memoir about her rise to fame but rather about the extraordinarily ordinary women in her family who gave her skills to become a successful advice columnist and at the same time raise a child.

I highly recommend this book - read it, then give a copy to your mom!