A Coming of Age in the Early Years of the 20th Century

Everything My Mother Taught Me by Alice Hoffman is a wonderful short story. Hoffman has such a gift for conveying the emotional map of a character in subtle but powerful ways. The book is primarily about a daughter, Adeline, and her acutely self absorbed young mother in the early 1900s. The author starts the book out with this passage, “There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires. This was not the case with us.” Adeline remembers, “She had told me often enough to keep my mouth shut, and now I did exactly that. I abolished all language on the day of my father’s funeral.”  

After her father dies Adeline and her mother mother move to Thatcher Island on the tip of Cape Ann in Essex County, Massachusetts to work in a lighthouse alongside two couples. Adeline never speaks on the island, and when asked at one point whether she ever could speak, she writes an answer about not speaking since her father died. The island is “…made up of fifty acres of rocks, a place consumed by woe from the start. In 1635, Anthony Thacher and his beloved wife were the only ones to survive a shipwreck when a storm came up and sank the Watch and Wait as it traveled from Ipswich to Marblehead. The tragedy claimed twenty-one souls, including their own four children, along with seven of their nieces and nephews. What can you expect to build on such sorrow? Only more sorrow to come. By the time we arrived, in 1908, there weren’t many who would bind their lives to such a remote and desolate place.” Needless to say what has been a bleak life up to this point with her mother seems to be headed for an even more challenging period.  

One of the women on the island named Julia becomes close with Adeline after an incident when she observes the mother slap her daughter for not performing a requested task. There is a lot of drama that takes place among the lighthouse adults, but rather than being depressing, the book feels empowering as two of the most victimized of the group begin to advocate for themselves, seeking answers and solutions, and essentially wresting control of their lives from others, placing their own destinies into their own hands, and in the process Adeline finds her own voice.