Mom & Me & Mom

The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother.

For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence—a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call “Lady,” revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them.

Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights.

Praise for Maya Angelou

“Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written and exceptional autobiographical narrative. . . . A beautiful book—an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.”—Kirkus Reviews, on I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Angelou is one of the geniuses of Afro-American serial autobiography.”—The New York Times

“To say that Angelou is a living legend is in no way an exaggeration. [She is] one of the great voices of contemporary literature.”—The Voice

“Maya Angelou regards the world and herself with intelligence and wit; she records the events of her life with style and grace.”—The Washington Post Book World

“A book to give to one’s daughter, mother, son or father, but definitely one to be read and savored.”—The Baltimore Sun, on Letter to My Daughter

Poet, writer, performer, teacher, and director Maya Angelou was raised in Stamps, Arkansas, and then moved to San Francisco. In addition to her groundbreaking autobiographies, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she has also written two cookbooks, five poetry collections, including I Shall Not Be Moved, three books of essays, including Letter to My Daughter, and six long-form poems, including “Mother” and “On the Pulse of Morning,” read at the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton.