Found: Novel about daughter reading mother’s diaries after an accident puts mother in a coma
Original topic subject: Novel about daughter reading mother’s diaries after an accident puts mother in a coma
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1nnedinma
Ok, I’m losing my mind trying to find this book and will appreciate any help finding it.
So it’s fiction, definitely a novel. Plot details I remember: The mother is in a car accident and ends up in a coma. Before she goes into the coma, she tells her daughter who she has a strained relationship with, to go into her study and read her diaries. The mother had been a nurse’s aide during the war. She had/has a husband who was in a wheelchair and was not kind to their daughter (this part is a bit fuzzy). She also had a son who died in an accident, and his widow and child live in the same house with her. The novel goes back and forth in time but we also get the daughter’s teenage and college years and when she eventually left home. Until her mother’s accident, the daughter hadn’t been home in a long while.
Genre: family saga (?) with historical elements tied to WWII. I don’t remember the cover clearly, but I think it was a mass market paperback, possibly with a muted or dark-toned design. It’s set in modern day (the present of the story is maybe 80s/90s, but with big flashbacks to the WWII era through the diaries.) It felt like a fairly long novel. And I read it in English in the 1990s, so I believe it was published in that decade or slightly earlier. It did not feel brand new when I read it though, so possibly an older paperback edition. I was an adult when I read it. Very early twenties. A friend gave it to me and she wanted it back after a couple of days so I wasn’t in possession of it for very long and read it really fast which is probably why the details are fuzzy.
The title in my head might be something like ‘Hidden Memories,’ (?) but I’m dubious. I may have made up that title because of the theme.
Any ideas?
So it’s fiction, definitely a novel. Plot details I remember: The mother is in a car accident and ends up in a coma. Before she goes into the coma, she tells her daughter who she has a strained relationship with, to go into her study and read her diaries. The mother had been a nurse’s aide during the war. She had/has a husband who was in a wheelchair and was not kind to their daughter (this part is a bit fuzzy). She also had a son who died in an accident, and his widow and child live in the same house with her. The novel goes back and forth in time but we also get the daughter’s teenage and college years and when she eventually left home. Until her mother’s accident, the daughter hadn’t been home in a long while.
Genre: family saga (?) with historical elements tied to WWII. I don’t remember the cover clearly, but I think it was a mass market paperback, possibly with a muted or dark-toned design. It’s set in modern day (the present of the story is maybe 80s/90s, but with big flashbacks to the WWII era through the diaries.) It felt like a fairly long novel. And I read it in English in the 1990s, so I believe it was published in that decade or slightly earlier. It did not feel brand new when I read it though, so possibly an older paperback edition. I was an adult when I read it. Very early twenties. A friend gave it to me and she wanted it back after a couple of days so I wasn’t in possession of it for very long and read it really fast which is probably why the details are fuzzy.
The title in my head might be something like ‘Hidden Memories,’ (?) but I’m dubious. I may have made up that title because of the theme.
Any ideas?
3Cecrow
Here's a link to its page on LT: The Hidden Years
