Mother, Daughter, Me by Katie Hafner

(Random House, $26)

Family togetherness sometimes can be overrated, said Julia M. Klein in Slate.com. When journalist Katie Hafner invited her 77-year-old mother to live with her four years ago, she had visions of a deep connection blossoming, one that would erase past grievances and create a lasting bond between her 16-year-old daughter and the family’s matriarch. But that fairy tale never materialized. There were underlying reasons, we learn from Hafner’s fine new memoir, why tensions overcame the household. “With crystalline prose and impressive narrative control,” Hafner charts the path she traveled toward the discovery that imagining a happy ending is easier than cohabiting with a difficult individual.

Indeed, the author’s childhood “seems scripted for a therapist’s couch,” said Cathi Hanauer in Elle. Her parents divorced when she was 5, and her mother soon descended into alcoholism, losing custody of her two girls after overdosing on pills. Four decades later, Hafner delivers the details in a cheery tone, but the wounds clearly haven’t healed, said Kathy Ewing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Soon after move-in day, her tactless mother clashes with teenage Zoë, and Hafner is caught in between. She also discovers that her mother is still drinking, albeit not as much as before. Worst of all, Hafner ceases being the ray of sunshine she’d like to be: “Turns out, she’s still a tiny bit angry after all.”

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“It’s a lot to digest,” said Hope Reese in The Boston Globe. Hafner also weaves in the story of Zoë’s late father and an account of her budding romance with a new man, and not all of those weighty strands get the same thoughtful treatment that she brings to the central mother-daughter narrative. Grandma ends up moving out. But though Hafner concludes that she can’t live with the woman, she in the end “offers a loving portrait of her mother,” a complicated woman who earns our sympathy too. Though each of the three housemates comes across as less than perfect, “witnessing the dynamics among women with such a complicated history is moving. Which is, after all, the point.”