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Reviewed by Jessyca Garcia for Readers' Favorite
Because of You: A Memoir of Growing, Grieving and Mothering Without a Mother by Leigh Vozzella is a short but heartfelt memoir about the author’s mother. It is also about how Vozzella overcame depression after her mother’s death. In Because of You, Vozzella writes about how after being abused by her mother as a child, she was able to rebuild a loving relationship with her as an adult. When Vozzella’s mother dies, she struggles with depression which causes everything in her life to suffer, including her marriage. This book tells how she fought the depression and coped with grief after losing her mother just as Vozzella was learning to love her again.
What drew me to Because of You was that it was about a loss of a parent and how the author dealt with the depression that followed. When Vozzella wrote about her mother’s funeral and how the body was “so cold”, and when the casket finally closed that it finally hit her that her mother was gone, it really got to me. When my own father died, I experienced the same feelings and said those exact words. After reading the first few chapters, I could not understand why or how Vozzella could have any love for her mother after suffering abuse at her hands for years. Later I understood that it was because her mother finally started to act like a mother, and because of this they were finally able to have a loving mother-daughter relationship.
Overall, I liked Because of You. I understand that writing this story was a healing process for Vozzella. This is good advice for anyone who has lost a loved one. I also admire Vozzella because she was able to make a difficult decision in her life in order to be happy. This is a good book for anyone who needs to start healing after losing a loved one or who needs advice on how to deal with grief.
