This is a heartbreaking and wise book. Anyone with a strained relationship with their parents or siblings will feel seen and gain hope for the future. Beautifully written.

If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother: A Conversation With Author Laura Davis
The author of the best-selling guide, The Courage to Heal, faces her greatest fear, her mother.

Laura Davis’ new memoir, courtesy of the author.
Laura Davis, the author of six best-selling books including The Courage to Heal and I Thought We’d Never Speak Again, wanted to explore the mother/daughter bond, yet ended up writing what I found to be a profoundly spiritual book. I, on the other hand, set out to write a book about a spiritual experience, only to discover much of my story was about my mother. I knew none of this before jumping on the chance to snap up The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother Daughter Story (out now), only that this author, whose work had transformed many lives, had now written a memoir.

Unlike her previous works, manuals geared toward survivors of sexual trauma, this book is a vivid portrayal of what it’s like to care for an aging parent. Given my dad’s current health decline, her book spoke to me. But The Burning Light of Two Stars is a balm for anyone who’s done the work of healing family wounds.

Below is a transcript of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.

KIRCHNER: In I Thought We’d Never Speak Again, you’ve written about reconciling with your mother. In revisiting that topic, would you say this book is a reckoning or a forgiveness? You make the distinction in your book.


The author, Laura Davis. Courtesy of the author.
DAVIS: This is more like the prequel and sequel to The Courage to Heal because it tells the story of our relationship before that period of time, as well as what happened afterwards. [In I Thought We’d Never Speak Again], the story of my mother and I was a small thread in a much bigger book that mostly featured other people’s stories then ends with my mother’s 70th birthday.

I would have said then that the two of us had reconciled. But when she was 80 and called to announce she was moving across the country to my town for the rest of her life? I lost that 3000-mile buffer between us. All the issues that had been set aside began to come up, and I was triggered in an extreme way. When that distance was gone, and she developed dementia, many of the characteristics she developed were similar to what her most difficult qualities had been for me in the past.

KIRCHNER: That was so brilliantly evoked in your book. My father also has dementia, and I’ve armchair diagnosed him as being on the autism spectrum because I think the word narcissist is thrown around too easily. He has all the markers of someone on the spectrum. From where we are now, I envy that your mother sold her house and said she wanted to quit while she was ahead. My dad needs to have care but he will not sell his house. He’s certainly not said anything about what kind of funeral arrangements he wants. He hasn’t even given me those clues. You talk about this in the book, a hallmark of dementia is that they aren’t aware that they are not aware. It reminds me of my experience with addiction and mental illness — “I’m fine! everyone else is wrong.”

DAVIS: For me there was also the reality of being in the sandwich generation. Of having a mother with dementia and two teenagers at the same time. And I run a business. I have a full life without any of that on top. That made it much harder, the stage of life I was in and that so many millions of people are squeezed in the same way.

KIRCHNER: In your Author’s Note at the end, you mentioned thinking you’d staged this story as a play. Both my books were staged first as a solo show, which I did as a way to help organize the stories. What was your process was like?

DAVIS: I first thought about writing it as a play because my mother was an actor and very engaged in theatre for over 50 years. I thought it would be a great tribute to her. Also, she’s an incredibly dramatic character. I wrote an entire draft of a play, took it to a friend who’s a well-known playwright, and when she finished, she said, “Laura, this is not a play. There’s nothing about this for the stage, except that here one person speaks, and there another person speaks.” Another friend was much harsher. She told me I had no business writing a play. “Write the damn memoir.”

KIRCHNER: Well, it is a memoir, a classic memoir in a way your other books haven’t been.

DAVIS: This was a steep learning curve. I knew how to write a book that would inform and inspire — and to really teach with a book. I didn’t know how to tell a book-length story. I’d written short stories, but I didn’t know how to how to create suspense, I didn’t know how to create a page turner. I had to learn a lot of skills, which almost had me giving up many times, feeling I wasn’t capable. But also, it was incredibly exciting. After teaching writing for more than 20 years, it was thrilling to have to learn so much about the craft.

The second iteration was going to be epistolary. When my mother died, I discovered a cache of letters in her things, shoeboxes full of letters. She had saved every letter I had ever written to her, and first drafts of all the letters she had written to me.

KIRCHNER: She saved first drafts of her own letters? Wow.

DAVIS: I had done the same. My mother is an articulate, wonderful writer. When I put it all together, there was this huge fat folder.

KIRCHNER: I thought the letters were incredible, which frankly surprised me. Often, I get frustrated with long letter passages, because they’re not written as well as the author writes. But the ones you included were beautiful.

DAVIS: And they were profound. Our relationship was not a bleak as I’d made it out to be. I always said my mother and I didn’t speak for seven years, but we corresponded that whole time. The letters were a huge part of my coming to terms with the truth of our relationship.

After I wrote that draft and sent it out to beta readers, the response was that it was like being on the outside of a private conversation. I abandoned that iteration, too. I didn’t think I had the writing chops. I didn’t know if I was capable of doing what I tell my students, which is to add this line to their story, “Here’s the part I never tell anyone.” I’d told this story almost as a recitation for many decades, and it was a version where I didn’t really reveal anything about myself. I look really good and my mother looks really bad. But each time I abandoned [the book], the story kept insisting on being told. Insisted.

The same woman I’d taken the play to, Susan Brown, who’s a colleague and a friend, said, “Laura, this isn’t the courage to heal, it’s the courage to reveal.”

I abandoned the book again at that point. When I came back to it, I put her words in big letters on my wall. I started getting much more honest. When my last set of beta readers said, “On this page, I loved you and hated your mother. And on this page, I hated you and loved your mother.” That’s when I knew I’d finished the book.

KIRCHNER: Which brings me to something we have in common. In my book (Blissful Thinking: A Memoir of Surviving the Wellness Revolution, May 2022), I also have a shift in thinking about spiritual ideas. We’ve both been earnestly involved in spiritual communities that we’re now less than enthusiastic about. I feel like I’ve gone through the same process with addiction recovery. I view it very differently now than I did when I first got clean.

DAVIS: Tell me a little bit about that.

KIRCHNER: I’ve changed a lot since 1986.

DAVIS: But how do you think about it differently?

KIRCHNER: One of the big messages spiritually-based recovery promotes is this idea that you are responsible for all the things that happened to you. And that gives you a certain agency over your problems in life, but it also demands then that you check your every move with a sponsor, that you agree that everything bad that happens to you is your fault, and I just don’t buy that anymore. Sure, you come into the program and your hair’s on fire, and you lit the match. But there are so many systemic problems in the world well beyond your control or agency. Taking on all the shit that happened caused me to mistrust of my own intuitive powers and ability to solve my problems. I became too indecisive, too susceptible, too gullible. And that’s a problem, which, for too long I thought was because of my ego. Then, too, I have huge problems with the patriarchal language of recovery, and the very Christian expressions of God, both of which seem to have gotten more extreme.

Now I sit on that edge where I still practice yoga and radical forgiveness and offer blessings, but I’m repelled at how often these ideas turn into magical thinking. My book is about seeking a path that allows me to use the tools I’ve found helpful in addiction recovery, but that I can genuinely believe. Meanwhile we both have people in our lives who remain on the original path.

DAVIS: Because I lived in an ashram and now live with a yoga teacher? And, of course, I live in Santa Cruz.

KIRCHNER: Yes! And then there’s your brother, who early on suggests you incarnated into trauma for a reason. My first thought was, “Oh god, I hate that shit.” Then I wondered how you were going to respond. I was relieved when you metaphorically rolled your eyes and yet I related as, throughout the book, you express these varying degrees of belief. Now I’m curious, what is your ongoing relationship with spirituality?

DAVIS: What do I want to say about that? I’m an intermittent spiritual practitioner.

KIRCHNER: You did describe yourself as a shitty meditator, which I thought was funny.

DAVIS: I am very comfortable with altered states, chemically- or drug-induced. I’ve done my own explorations of psychedelics and plant medicine. I’m drawn to those experiences because the mind is such a trap. I’m an obsessive thinker and worker, and it takes something very strong to pull me out of that.

I’m also comfortable around birth and death. I’m aware there’s more that exists than our everyday reality, and I can easily drop into those states and feel comfortable. That’s been true for me since I was a teenager and I was in the ashram — though now I’d say I was in a cult — but I’ve had profound experiences outside the realm of rational thought.

I mention metta practice in the book just once; it’s something I’ve practiced for decades. Being a cancer survivor meant living with the possibility of my death very intimately. It changed me but also fortified something I already felt right about living on the edge. I’m drawn to that. Yet I’ve also created a lot of stability in my life. I’ve been in this relationship for over 30 years. I’ve only lived in two houses in the last 30 years. I’ve raised three children. I have three grandchildren. I own a house, a car. Maybe because I lived in an ashram as a teenager, I’m turned off by New Age expressions of spirituality, but I welcome the actual experience.

KIRCHNER: And the need to define and categorize and make cute t-shirts and hashtags — it’s too much and why we need the nuance of books. In mine, I hope readers glean from it that trusting your gut is important but it’s sort of best facilitated when you come at it from a place of wholeness, which is why I think it’s more important to invest in a diverse group of friends than the latest spiritual enterprise. What would you hope readers take away from your book?

DAVIS: That we can keep growing until we die and that if you live long enough, things you thought were intractable and impossible sometimes become possible. Healing from trauma and kind of all the ways we settle into our coping behaviors can be changed over the course of a lifetime. Healing from trauma looks different to me 30 years ago than it does now.

It’s an ongoing process, but it keeps becoming more and more expansive, and less about the original trauma. If you’d asked me who I was in my 20s, incest survivor would have been at the top of the list. Today, I’d say I’m a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a teacher, an author, a friend, a swimmer, a hiker, a sister. Incest survivor would not on the list. Not because of denial. I’ve worked through it as much as I possibly could. You don’t get to erase your history. But the incest with my grandfather is in the fabric of the cloth that shaped me. It’s integrated into who I am. There are vulnerabilities I carry because of that — and some incredible strengths. I would have imagined that that was possible in my 20s. I never would have imagined that I’d be taking care of my mother at the end of her life. I would have laughed at you.

To order, visit The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother Daughter Story.

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Laura Davis wrote "The Courage to Heal" with Ellen Bass which was and is an important book for adult survivors of abuse. This book is her powerful story about surviving and coming to terms with remembering as her mother loses her memory. It is also a story about reconciliation and becoming the parent to your own parents as they age and become dependent on us. This book also details the experience of trying to get an unwilling parent to do what is best for their health and safety and deal with health care systems and assisted living facilities etc. It also aptly conveys being a part of what is called the "sandwich generation" - trying to mother your own children as they grow up and go off to college as your parent begins to become more dependent -- like an inverse relationship -- made all the more fraught given the estrangement from the past. This was a very intense read and I had to put it down at times and come back to it.

This is an honest look at caring for an elderly parent. Anyone who has experienced this will relate, and readers interested in real-life issues may be interested in this book.

I received a free copy via Netgalley. My review is voluntary.

The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother Daughter Story (2021) is an absorbing and thoughtfully written exploration of author Laura Davis challenging and turbulent relationship with her mother Temme Davis; who passed away in a Santa Cruz California nursing facility near the home Davis shared with her wife Karyn and their two children. Davis (1956-), is a bestselling author of seven non-fiction books, and a popular international writing instructor, her retreats are attended by students and followers from the US and abroad.

Throughout her life, Davis felt the profound absence and loss of her twin sister Vicki, who died at birth following their premature delivery. Temme’s marriage to her wayward husband would not last, her father abandoned the family after taking Laura to the Woodstock festival. Laura witnessed the young people openly smoking weed and a few couples having sex in sleeping bags on the muddy fields, while listening to the music of Jimmy Hendrix and Janis Joplin in the rain.
As an overworked social worker and single mother, Temme became highly stressed out, often impatient and clueless of her daughter’s feelings and needs. Paul, her older brother, soon left the home becoming a “Premie” of the east Indian spiritual master and guru Maharaji Ji/Prem Rawat. Laura eventually joined the cult and lived at an ashram for a few years, but left after finding it overly controlling and restrictive.

Davis met Ellen Bass in a writer’s group-- the co-author of Davis controversial book: “The Courage To Heal: For Women Survivor’s of Sexual Abuse” (1988). This was the acclaimed groundbreaking book that ignited the Recovered Memory Movement. There is a great deal of research and academic studies that address the social and cultural impact of this movement, also the unknown numbers of personal stories and memoirs; many are/were related to this notable book, which is no longer in print. Davis briefly recalled her fame resulting from the book’s release. However, Laura, Temme, and other family members were estranged for over a decade after the book was published.

After Davis invited her mother to leave her condo in New Jersey and move nearby in California, Temme was in her eighties, and had seen a personal physician that diagnosed her with Alzheimer’s Disease. The care of Temme’s end of life journey was challenging for them both, their combined knowledge of eldercare seemed somewhat limited. The detailed account of Temme’s cremation stands out, and can’t be unread, not allowing for a final dignity she deserved. Still, Davis truly loved her mother and fully supported and cared for her in several unexpected ways until she passed in peace. (3.5*GOOD) **With thanks to Girl Friday Books (GFB) via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.

This was a very interesting read. I had no prior knowledge of the background of Laura Davis, other than the Courage to Heal. I enjoyed reading into what it was like for her to have her mother nearby.

Laura Davis co-authored the book "The Courage To Heal' , the breakthrough tome for and about survivors of sexual abuse written 30 years ago, which brought the topic to the forefront of a national conversation long overdue. In this memoir, she provides the harrowing story of her own experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her grandfather, beginning at age 3. She also describes her family's denial and her mother's rage when she exposed the incident, and how she became estranged from her mother and her mother's side of the family for decades, when they could not accept that the grandfather could do such a thing.

Laura was accused of lying, and there was anger and betrayal between herself and her mother for much of her adult life. The story here is how Laura dealt with that while building a life of her own, a successful career and family, and her compartmentalizing her feelings about her mother's denial of her truth at the same time.

As her mother ages, she decides to move to Laura's town and the story takes a turn, becoming that of a resentful and hurt adult child being in the position of caretaking her parent with dementia. We are riveted as Laura's attitude changes, she resolves some of her past feelings, and new ones- some just as devastating as the ones from the past- evolve while watching her mother deteriorate.

Highly recommended for anyone with troubling and disturbing parental relationships, and those conflicted about caring for aging parents whose past betrayals still fester.

Davis writes an honest telling of her relationship with her mother, fraught with many pitfalls. I had much empathy as I read all the care that fell on her and her partner as her mother aged. How she has to manage her mother’s care, deal,with her mother’s issues, while her brother shirked his responsibilities. Anyone who faces elder care or who has experienced it will have loads of sympathy. The most difficult part of the book, for me was reading about and her brother and her literally watching their mother be cremated. I thought that was macabre. It’s an interesting book.

***Thanks to NetGalley for providing me a complimentary copy of THE BURNING LIGHT OF TWO STARS by Laura Davis in exchange for my honest review.***

*Disclaimer #2 Laura Davis is a hero of mine. Her first book, THE COURAGE TO HEAL about recovery from sexual abuse saved my life, literally and figuratively. Our personal lives share many similarities from sexual abuse to breast cancer to Jewish grandparents. I don’t know her personally and despite my admiration for her, I believe my review to be objective.

I’m not a big memoir reader, particularly of someone whose life is so similar to mine in many ways, but wanted to read Davis’s as I followed her publishing journey on Facebook. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d be interested as mothers aren’t my favorite topic and I just found out my estranged father died last month. I was approved for the ARC of THE BURNING LIGHT OF TWO STARS the day before my move to an over 55 community so I couldn’t begin for a few days and I sat down to read a chapter in between unpacking. Hours later, buckets of tears shed and no boxes unpacked, I finished.

THE BURNING LIGHT OF TWO STARS begins in utero with Laura’s identical twin Vickie who lived only a day. From start to finish I cycled through a myriad of emotions from sentimental longing to joy to sadness to wanting to punch her brother in the face (which *is* a feeling to me and I’ll die on that sword).

Davis’s writing is alive, active, personable, passionate and gritty, though never in a manner that feels over-written or indulgent. She’s clearly someone who knows herself, warts and all, and is comfortable sharing her imperfections. The steady pacing did have some detail that I wanted to skim, like details about her brother’s new age journey (not enough to detract from my enjoyment or to drop to 4.5 stars because I should be unpacking and I’m highly distractible right now).

THE BURNING LIGHT OF TWO STARS is the memoir I didn’t know I needed to read (for even more personal reasons than I wrote). The audience for this book is as diverse as the topics covered, family, abuse, estrangement, LGBT, caregiving to name a few.