An introspective and beautiful dual memoir by the #1 New York Times bestselling novelist and her daughter. Look out for Ann Kidd Taylor's new novel, The Shark Club, which will be published in June 2017.
Sue Monk Kidd has touched millions of readers with her novels The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair and with her acclaimed nonfiction. In this intimate dual memoir, she and her daughter, Ann, offer distinct perspectives as a fifty-something and a twenty-something, each on a quest to redefine herself and to rediscover each other.
Between 1998 and 2000, Sue and Ann travel throughout Greece and France. Sue, coming to grips with aging, caught in a creative vacuum, longing to reconnect with her grown daughter, struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel. Ann, just graduated from college, heartbroken and benumbed by the classic question about what to do with her life, grapples with a painful depression. As this modern-day Demeter and Persephone chronicle the richly symbolic and personal meaning of an array of inspiring figures and sites, they also each give voice to that most protean of connections: the bond of mother and daughter.
A wise and involving book about feminine thresholds, spiritual growth, and renewal, Traveling with Pomegranates is both a revealing self-portrait by a beloved author and her daughter, a writer in the making, and a momentous story that will resonate with women everywhere. Praise for Traveling with Pomegranates:
"Thoughtful, honest, and uplifting." -The Los Angeles Times
"Any mother or daughter would enjoy or relate to the touching struggle of developing a close relationship as adult women." -The Associated Press
"Read this one as a memoir, a travelogue and as a self-renewal book" -Milwaukee Journal Sentinel SUE MONK KIDD is the author of the novels, The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, and the memoirs, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, When the Heart Waits, and Firstlight, a collection of early writings. The Secret Life of Bees has spent more than 125 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into an award-winning movie. The Mermaid Chair, a #1 New York Times bestseller, was adapted into a television movie. Each of her novels has been translated into more than 24 languages. The recipient of numerous literary awards, Sue lives in South Carolina with her husband.
Ann Kidd Taylor is a graduate of Columbia College in South Carolina. She has published articles and essays in Skirt! magazine in Charleston, SC, where she worked for two years after college as an editorial assistant. She left to pursue a career in writing, working on a book about her travels, which evolved into Traveling with Pomegranates, a memoir she co-authored with her mother Sue Monk Kidd. It is her first book. Ann lives near Charleston with her husband and son.
Sue
National Archaeological Museum–Athens
Sitting on a bench in the National Archaeological Museum inGreece, I watch my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Ann, angle hercamera before a marble bas- relief of Demeter and Persephoneunaware of the small ballet she's performing- her slow, precisesteps forward, the tilt of her head, the way she dips to one knee asshe turns her torso, leaning into the sharp afternoon light. The scenereminds me of something, a memory maybe, but I can't recall what.I only know she looks beautiful and impossibly grown, and forreasons not clear to me I'm possessed by an acute feeling of loss.
It's the summer of 1998, a few days before my fiftieth birthday.Ann and I have been in Athens a whole twenty- seven hours, agood portion of which I've spent lying awake in a room in theHotel Grande Bretagne, waiting for blessed daylight. I tell myselfthe bereft feeling that washed over me means nothing- I'mjet- lagged, that's all. But that doesn't feel particularly convincing.
I close my eyes and even in the tumult of the museum, wherethere seem to b
