Margaret Whitford

Release Date: COMING SUMMER 2026

 
OVERVIEW

When Margaret's mother was dying, instead of asking for her daughter, she told those present that Margaret had her history. This was true in a literal sense. Margaret had conducted interviews with her mother during the last decade of her life. But the emotional distance between them remained, and Margaret chose not to go to her mother's side during her final days.

In this memoir, Margaret comes to terms with that decision by unearthing in her mother's traumatic past the roots of their estrangement. She examines how a history marked by the devastation of World War II in Europe, a violent childhood home, and sexual assault led to her mother's complex PTSD and shaped the way she raised Margaret as her firstborn and a daughter.

Being born to a deeply wounded mother, who lacked the tools to recover, meant that Margaret carried her mother's trauma forward in her sense of self, in her relationships to others, and in the ways she navigated her world. Indeed, Margaret had her mother’s history. She embodied that history.

The History We Carry confronts the legacy of intergenerational trauma with wisdom and compassion, revealing how familial history shapes each of us but need not be wholly determinative in whom we become and how we choose to live.