Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

Traveling with Pomegranates

by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

(Thanks, Jill!)

Together, best-selling author Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees) and her daughter Ann Kidd Taylor recount their journeys to Greece and France as they navigate through life's phases: one entering adulthood, the other entering menopause. Both wrote alternating chapters in this memoir, which was a nice way to read about the experiences because "there is always two sides to every coin"...not to mention, this is how I envision Elizabeth & I writing our book.

A recurring theme is the myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, in which Persephone is abducted to the underworld (eats pomegranate seeds) and eventually reunites with her mother. As the real-life mother and daughter visit archaeological sites from that story and others, each relic and icon they visit becomes infused with personal meaning. For example, the Virgin Mary comes to symbolize hope for the mother. She prays to a black Mary icon in a church in Crete for encouragement to write fiction and after The Secret Life of Bees was published, she returned to the same Mary and offered a pot of honey as an offering.

The book lacked much plot and focused more on heavy introspection as they both were navigating the waters of growing closer in their relationship as adults. Also, the two writing styles were starkly different; Ann Kidd Taylor's being much more easier to read for me.

Probably wouldn't recommend it! (sorry, Jill! :)

Maybe it is a feminine thing, I don't know -- but whenever I've managed to find new consciousness and renewals of my work, my relationships and myself, it has been by going down into what seemed like a holy dark. p. 77

I sit on the stone ledge as depression floods in. I try to hold myself there, to not jump up and take more pictures, to not run away. I remember when I was around nine, playing rodeo in the ocean waves with my brother, straddling a raft, and how a large wave unexpectedly knocked me off and shoved me under. Before I could surface, another wave pushed me down, then another. But this is not a game. This is my life. The darkness tunneling back and back. p. 82

Journeying is the predominant means of developing one's self in this culture, not the habitation of place. It has been true of me. Always the seeker. Yet at this phase of my life, when I look at my house at the edge of the marsh, I want to learn how to be in it. I want to behave like a finder as much as a seeker. The irony is that I had to go on an elaborate journey to figure this out. So much of my growing older seems to be about paradoxes. The reconciliation of opposites. The bringing to balance. p. 121

She has been the keeper of home for me, and I have been the keeper of the journey for her. And now we look for the lost portion in each other. p. 123

The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning. p. 143

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

-David Whyte