Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens. And I'm Jan Black. One of the toughest things that can be

faced by a girl or a woman of any age is the loss of her mother.

Our guest, Hope Edelman, knows all about that. In fact, she knows more about it than most of us.

Hope is an expert in the field of early mother-loss and mother-daughter relationships.

She's written extensively on those topics and is the author of the books

motherless daughters and motherless mothers, among others. Hope, thank you so much for joining us on

the show today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Can you give us some background as to how

you came to be known as a leader on the subject of motherless daughters?

Well, Motherless Daughters was first published in 1994, and I think back on that, and gosh, I was so young.

I had lost my mom as a teenager in the 1980s. I was 15 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was 17 when she died.

And I went looking for a book on the subject to understand what I was thinking and feeling,

because I didn't know any other girls who'd lost their mom other than my sister. And all of the

books that I found were for adult women whose moms had died. It was almost as

if there was no acknowledgement that this could happen when you were young. And about 10 years

later, when I was in graduate school, I was still looking for the book and couldn't find it

and decided that I would research and write it myself. So I interviewed more than 100 women, and I surveyed

more than that. And then the book came out in 1994, and it became an international bestseller

right away because there was just nothing out there for these millions of girls and women

who had been children or teenagers or even young adults when their moms had

died. And now the book's been out for that would be 24 years. It's in its third edition.

And so I'm continuously updating it with the new research that's coming out and the new

experiences that I have in my life as well.

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