The Obsession is a deeply committed and beautifully written analysis of our society's increasing demand that women be thin. It offers a careful, thought provoking discussion of the reasons men have encouraged this obsession and women have embraced it. It is a book about women's efforts to become thin rather than to accept the natural dimensions of their bodies--a book about the meaning of food and its rejection.

For years Kim Chernin thought her activist mother was her role model. She grew up in a household where her mother, a stormy revolutionary, organized meetings and debated politics. She was, she thought, her mother's daughter. Now, decades later, the author, a California psychoanalyst, finds that it is her father's gentle manner that has profoundly influenced her. While her mother taught her that she could change the world through bold action, in large and important ways, her father sought to make things happen in small ways. Now Chernin finds herself drawn to recollections of her father quietly working in his garden, which was, for her, she now realizes, a sanctuary and a school. Through three personal stories, Chernin, author of In My Mothers House, reflects on her own spiritual impulses. Whether she is comforting a dying woman or seeking wisdom from a Hindu holy woman, she keeps returning to the image of her father in his garden. That image helps awaken Chernin to a spiritual awareness and a realization that the world can be changed through gentle, caring deeds on a small scale - as small (and as large) as her father's garden.

In My Mother's House depicts a profound, intergenerational struggle between a powerful, politically engaged mother, Rose, and her spiritually inclined poet and writer daughter, Kim. Framing this collision are two other generations. There is Rose's mother from the shtetl, a broken woman regularly beaten by her husband but the source of the family's stories. And Kim's daughter, a second-generation, fully assimilated girl of eight at the time the book begins. Four generations, from the shtetl to an affluent intellectual household in Berkeley, California, the story is a historical record and reckoning between the old activist left and a beginning feminist movement. The double narrative allows Kim to explore the evolving relationship between mother and daughter, who, through their storytelling, are brought to a profound understanding and reconciliation.