All seventeen stories deal with a single, central, and vital theme: the relationship of mothers to daughters and daughters to mothers, and it is the interplay of this dynamic that provides the focus of these wonderfully felt and beautifully told stories. The permutations and variations on this theme are marvelously intricate and diverse: the loss of a mother to madness; the loss of a daughter to drugs; the mother who feels she has sacrificed her life to an ungrateful child; the daughter who finally sees her mother as a person in her own right.