SOURCE: “Mother's Curse,” in Partisan Review, Vol. LVI, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 683-86.

In the following excerpt, Kelley finds shortcomings in the structure and narrative voice of Anywhere but Here.

In all these first novels (except for Rope-Dancer, a short-story collection [by M.J. Fitzgerald]) by women, the sins of mothers—and their sorrows—are visited upon their children. Each female protagonist has to escape her mother's power in order to discover her own. But that struggle necessarily involves, as each woman faces maturity herself, some conflicted understanding of her mother's sufferings and mistakes. Ambivalence about the past runs deep in these narratives and adulterates the women's achievement of selfhood. …

Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here unfolds a destructive mother-daughter relationship too, but Ann August, the daughter suffering from the curse of her mother's possessive neurosis, does grow up, and her struggle takes place in a more familiar and realistic...