Overview

What looks like personality is sometimes a profession.You have read the books. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Will I Ever Be Good Enough? The narcissist books. The cold-mother books. The high-conflict family books. On the page, you nodded. You highlighted. You waited for the door to open. Every time you closed the book, you found that the diagnosis did not quite fit. Your mother is not cold. Your mother is not a narcissist. Your mother is, by any honest reckoning, a remarkable person. And yet there is something. Something at the edges. Something you have been trying to put a finger on since you were a teenager. This book names it. The Surgeon's Daughter is a literary essay about adult children of competent, accomplished, often beloved parents. The surgeons. The lawyers. The teachers. The salespeople. The entrepreneurs. The clergy. The strange weather of growing up beside someone whose professional instrument has, by long use, become her only instrument. The French have a name for it: deformation professionnelle. The bending of a person by her profession until the bending becomes the person. Dana Lunger argues, gently and at length, that what you have been calling your mother's coldness, or her narcissism, or her difficulty, is more often the back-pressure of a working life that never learned to take its hands off the work. The diagnosis is not personality. The diagnosis is profession. The book moves through eleven kinds of professional parent. It pauses, in the middle, to interrupt itself: a chapter about a cleaner named Beverly, who reminds the narrator that not every child is the child of a profession. It ends with what to do. The conversation. The witness. The slow and accurate work of seeing the parent you actually have. For the reader who has resisted the available diagnoses because she suspects, correctly, that they do not name what is actually wrong. For readers of: Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments Adam Phillips, Missing Out Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story An essay in sixteen chapters.

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