Too Close for Comfort?

Book excerpt: A fascinating look at how mothers and their adult daughters have formed a greater friendship than generations past?and whether or not their should be boundaries. No relationship is more complicated than the one between mothers and daughters? especially today, when a cultural shift can cause a longer period of time of overlapping interests before the traditional adult markers of marriage and family. As a result, these young women are developing deeper bonds with their own mothers, a relationship that sometimes mimics friendship. But are these close bonds healthy? Is it time to cut the umbilical cord? In this eye-opening book, Linda Perlman Gordon and Susan Morris Shaffer explore the modern mother-daughter relationship in all its glorious complexity. Combining a brilliant sociological analysis with fascinating stories of real- life women, Too Close for Comfort? provides a rich, provocative look at the ways mothers and daughters get it right, how they get it wrong?and how they can happily maintain being friends as well as mothers and daughters.