All the Lost Girls: Confessions of a Southern Daughter (Deep South Books)

Patricia Foster's lyrical yet often painful memoir exploresthe life of a white middle-class girl who rew up in rural south Alabamain the 1950s and 1960s, a time and place that did not tolerate deviationfrom traditional gender roles. Her mother raised Foster and her sisteras "honorary boys," girls with the ambition of men but the temperamentof women.An unhappy, intelligent woman who kept a heartbreaking secretfrom everyone close to her, Foster's mother was driven by a repressed ragethat fed her obsession for middle-class respectability.By the time Foster reached age fifteen, her efforts toreconcile the contradictory expectations that she be at once ambitiousand restrained had left her nervous and needy inside even while she triedto cultivate the appearance of the model student, sister, and daughter.It was only a psychological and physical breakdown that helped her to realizethat she couldn't save her driven, complicated mother and must struggleinstead for both understanding and autonomy.