Traveling with Pomegranates

“My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression.”

This is a reflective memoir co-authored by Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor. The book follows their journeys through Greece and France as they each navigate pivotal moments in their lives—Sue grappling with the transition into midlife and the empty-nest phase, and Ann seeking direction after college while struggling with self-doubt. As they explore these ancient lands, their personal reflections deepen, show more revealing the complexity of their mother-daughter relationship and their own individual quests for identity and purpose.

This book was not what I expected. For no clear reason, I assumed it was about a mom-daughter U.S. road trip, not an introspective journey through Greece and France. I liked how Greek mythology was a significant part of the storytelling; not being Christian, I couldn't relate at all with the large amount of content about Mary (mother of Jesus).

As a mother of an adult daughter whom I cherish, I was eager to dive into this book. We moms can always use all the help we can get as we navigate the sometimes-tricky terrain of relating to our daughters as they enter adulthood. This book invited me to reflect on my own relationship, and I was interested in the way Sue and Ann shared their different perspectives. The lesson of never taking anything personally was constantly running through my head.

Beyond the mother-daughter relationship, the book is a good one for empty-nester women who are looking to redefine their lives in a new chapter and for young women at the end of college who are struggling to launch themselves into the world.

While I found bits and pieces of the book helpful, the pacing was quite slow for me. It’s a very reflective narrative that moves at a gentle, sometimes sluggish, pace. At times, it felt like it dragged, and it wasn’t one of those books I was rushing to pick up again.

Any woman with a deep love of Greece or an appreciation for its mythology, history, and landscape will especially enjoy the book. show less

Sue is dealing with turning fifty, an aging body and a new realization of her mortality. Her daughter Ann, at twenty-two, has received a rejection letter for grad school that has her questioning her purpose in life and her own self-worth. Both are redefining their relationship, as Ann has become a young woman and Sue begins to interact with her not just as a daughter but as a fellow adult and friend.

Told in alternating chapters, Sue and Ann share their internal struggles and joys as they travel in Greece, Turkey, and more. Sue especially is in search for the divine feminine and what she calls the "Old Woman," a sort of dimension she believes needs to be added to her spirituality. Ann struggles with depression and has an ongoing search show more to become less of a wallflower. Together, they tell the story of their joint travels - the external becoming a metaphor for the internal. Both women are incredibly introspective, to me quite frustratingly so as I prefer the concrete to metaphors, and boy is this metaphor heavy (Greek myths, understandably, figure hugely). My library categorizes this book as Travel Essays, but this is rather a misnomer as it has less to do with where they go and what they see as it is what they felt and experienced. If you like that, great. But I generally found it very hard to connect, especially with Sue, though I did enjoy the portions that dealt with images that found their way into The Secret Life of Bees. Ann is closer to my age and I can somewhat remember working through my own "finding my purpose in life" time, though not thinking nearly so much or so deeply. show less

Sue Monk Kidd ends this memoir with an apt quote from Anais Nin, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” [Traveling with Pomegranates] is a personal journey for both Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter Ann Kidd Taylor. As they journey in Greece and France, each of these women is finding herself while simultaneously re-forging the mother and daughter relationship. Sue struggles to find creative energy in herself as she faces 50. Ann, depressed and withdrawn after being rejected from graduate school, searches for a direction in life.

The most interesting aspects of this memoir relate to Sue Monk Kidd’s novel [The Secret Life of Bees]. During her travels, Sue Monk Kidd develops a personal religion melded from show more a cult of Mary, classical mythology, and ancient goddesses which forms the basis of the unique Mary/goddess worship that takes place in the novel. The author also describes her struggles to shape the work and her intriguing use of a montage of seemingly random pictures as an “outline” for the novel.

Ann Kidd Taylor’s writing pales in comparison to her mother’s complex examination of the interrelationships of myth and life. show less

I was very disappointed in this book. It looks like a mother-daughter travel memoir, but really it's about depression and a mid-life crisis. I found it very difficult to relate to the mother's chagrin over being 50 and having a grown daughter. Partly that's because I'm in a different life stage, but Kidd wallows at such length that I had trouble mustering any empathy.

I related more to the daughter, but while depression is a topic I understand very well, I wish she had directed more of her attention outside of herself, at least in writing the memoir, even if she weren't able to while traveling.

I found the story of how Sue Monk Kidd conceptualized and wrote her novel, The Secret Life of Bees, to be very interesting (and educational too!). I thoroughly enjoyed both author's descriptions of the traditions and rituals that have meaning to them and loved how Sue created her own ceremonial observances to help her process events in her own life. However I found the back and forth of chapters between mother and daughter to be forced and contrived much of the time, which detracted from the overall book.

A friend of mine read this book and loved it, passing it on to me. Wish I could say I liked it, but I did not. I read it quickly, first to get to the Paris part, and then to finish it to give back to my friend. I found both women, mother and author Sue Monk KIdd and her daughter Ann Kidd Taylor; totally self-absorbed. They were traveling the world, with other people, but seeing only their own interior lives. Both were in transition periods and that may have accounted for and excused some of their being totally wrapped up in themselves, but it made for terribly dull reading, and was a big disappointment to someone who had just come back from a trip to Paris with her daughters! Also, I got the distinct impression both women are quite show more introspective and their own emotional and spiritual temperatures are what is of the most compelling interest to them. Their feminism struck me as being more narrow than broadening or freeing. From their few comments about their husbands, both seem to be married to very fine men, but they both brush off their husbands and have next to no references to any masculine influence at all. I can't imagine a man enjoying this book, though I imagine some women who identify with the different stages of their lives and their relationship with each other, will, as my friend did. Another thing that really bothered me is that the writers construct their own spiritual "trinity" of Athena, Joan of Arc, and Mary, and pray to them. Sue and Ann consider themselves very spiritual, but I thought they seem to be separated from spiritual truth, and certainly from biblical truths. Their spirituality seems to be a self-construct of paganism and self actualization. Interestingly, Ann Kidd Taylor, the daughter, a neophyte, writes better, I thought, than her mother, the experienced author -- Ann's voice is more conversational and clearer, and she communicates better, but then Sue Monk KIdd's writing has always seemed somewhat labored and pretentious to me. show less

This is a very personal book--two writers mother and daughter write about what is happening in their lives while they travel together. I could relate to Sue Monk Kidd's half as a mother half and as a woman of a certain age facing getting older. I could relate to her daughter Ann Taylor Kidd as a young woman in her twenties struggling to find her path. This isn't like a lot of travel memoirs--in some ways the traveling seems to take a back seat to the internal struggle for both. I enjoyed this but I'm not sure it would be for everyone.