Excerpts & Endorsements
“Emotional, heartbreaking, poignant, introspective, and hopeful all at the same time.” – BOOKTRIB
“A compelling remembrance that skillfully explores the cost of family secrets.” – KIRKUS REVIEWS
In Childless Mother, Tracy Mayo has written a heart-rending story of maternal love sustained over decades of absence, a gripping psychological thriller of the search for a lost child, and a lyrical reflection on our largest themes: parenthood, selfhood, and redemption. A beautiful book that will resound for anyone with a complex family, meaning everyone. – HEATHER HARPHAM, author of Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After
“When Tracy Mayo became pregnant in 1969 at age fourteen, others assumed the authorship of her life. After telling a fictitious story about her whereabouts to family and friends, her parents put her in a home for ‘unwed mothers’ where she was given a pseudonym for the remainder of her pregnancy. She was forced to relinquish her son at birth, but she never stopped thinking of him and of herself as mother. Tracy writes her own story in Childless Mother. In vivid and compelling prose, she not only reclaims her son, but she also reclaims the truth of herself as woman and mother.” – DEE MONTALBANO, author of Crossing Seventy, Moments of Outrageous Aging
“Tracy Mayo’s “Childless Mother” is a revelation that should be on the shelves of every family, regardless of how it is constructed. Mayo transforms her fundamental loss, like alchemy, into many precious strands, forging despair into self-saving hope that one day her bond with her son would be felt as real by him as it was for her. Courageously truthful about her life’s trajectory toward reunion and its aftermath, Tracy Mayo’s adoption story exalts the connection we all yearn for.” — CAROL BROBECK, first mother
“In her courageous and beautifully rendered memoir, Childless Mother, Tracy Mayo breaks ranks with the institutionalized secrecy, shame, and silencing that shattered countless pregnant girls and young women prior to legalized abortion and open adoption. Mayo grieved in private for decades, with only a grainy Polaroid photo of her relinquished newborn to prove he’d ever existed, and only the redemptive natural world as her steady companion. Her reclamation of her story reveals the unyielding tenacity of her maternal bond as well as the hard-won compassion she brings to her memories. Childless though she may have been for far too long, Tracy Mayo is ultimately the deeply rooted, everlasting mother of three: the son she never forgot, the bereft teenage girl she once was and has embraced, and this heartfelt book – a testament to her constellatory spirit and her vast, fathomless heart.” – KATE MOSES, author of Wintering, Cakewalk: A Memoir, and Mothers Who Think