George’s Daughter is a memoir/essay about a daughter’s attempt to live in accordance with her own values, in spite of conflicts with an adored but nonetheless controlling and racist father. Ultimately, her refusal to end a romantic relationship of which her father does not approve, leads to emotionally catastrophic consequences for them both.
George’s Daughter is written in three sections: “To Inhabit,” “To Inherit,” and “To Disown.” A complex story of contradiction, disillusion, and love, George’s Daughter originates in the neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, after World War II. During the author’s childhood, Crown Heights was reeling from the traumas of displaced persons, survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, and those who had lost entire families to the war. Decades later, the neighborhood was again traumatized by tensions, discriminations, and disruptions caused by opposing racial and religious politics that continue to this day.
The relationship between George and his daughter evolves against this tumultuous background. These themes will resonate with those who face familial discord when they or a family member does not adhere to conventional expectations, whether around gender, race, class, religion, politics, or culture.
George’s Daughter illuminates how the decision to live one’s life as one must, may cause enormous psychic rupture: A person might lose, but ultimately find again, both their family and their sense of self in the process.
“Carol Becker has written a tender, deeply nuanced portrayal of a father and daughter’s evolving relationship, rich with love, betrayal, and the ruptures brought by shifting identities and a transforming New York City. Her poetic prose, suffused with details, romance and heartache, stayed with me long after reading.”
— Ramin Bahrani, Oscar-nominated, writer-director, filmmaker
“After having written about attainable empowerment among women in mediating changes toward growth in The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change; grieving over the death of her beloved mother in Losing Helen; Carol Becker, once again, has resourced her “amor fati” to confront impending personal issues with her father in George’s Daughter––her trilogy as it were. Suffused with compelling prose, emphatic clarity, and eventual compassion, her personal reconciliation through the arts and humanities as healing agents, mirrors our own.”
— Phong H. Bui, Publisher, Artistic Director of The Brooklyn Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects
“This book is not just a beautifully written memoir. It's a story about the human condition. Neatly laid out sentences on pages jumble and leap with the complexities of life, love and loss. A reminder on the fallibility of relationships which traverse landscapes of memory and time, the book is also a journey into the most difficult and human of all possible actions, the act of forgiveness. Could there be a more poignant lesson for this troubled world”?
— Brad Evans, Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence, University of Bath
“George’s Daughter is a journey of return—to Carol Becker’s spirited childhood in an intricately drawn Jewish/Catholic family in immigrant Brooklyn and to a complicated yet beloved father. This tender and beautifully written memoir is a rare glimpse into what it means to come to terms with the mixture of love and anger, attachment and heartbreak that makes the ties between daughters and fathers unbreakable.”
— Marianne Hirsch, Author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust