It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks

A funny and moving memoir about a daughter’s turbulent relationship with her mother – and how a child of one’s own can turn everything upside down.


‘Life is a series of losses. I’ve decided to be very zen about it. I have lost two husbands, my parents, my brother, countless friends; it is just one loss after another. You might as well get used it.’ So muses the author’s mother in this poignant and humorous memoir about mothers and daughters, and the miraculous things that happen when daughters become mothers.


Loss is a way of life for both Catherine L. Burns and her mother, but where it made the daughter ravenous for contact, it made the mother lose her appetite for people. While the two always had a fierce attachment, by turns intimate and tumultuous, decades of fractious and contentious and frustrating interactions found a reprieve after the birth of Catherine’s daughter, Olive. Witty and direct, weaving back and forth in time, the book charts the transformation of this volatile and unique mother-daughter relationship from longing to connection.


A book about love, mortality, and the nature of family bonds, ‘It Hit Me Like A Ton of Bricks’ is a must-read for anyone trying to navigate their way through the distance between their fantasies of love and the realities of family relationships.