Book Review: THIS IS YOUR MOTHER by Erika J. Simpson
- elichvar
- Jan 20
- 4 min read
Erika J. Simpson
This Is Your Mother: A Memoir
Scribner / May 2025 / 213 pp / $27.99 Hardcover
Reviewed by Josephine Greenfield / January 2026
“Imagine this is your mother, Sallie Carol. Daughter of sharecroppers. Middle of ten.”
Thus begins Erika J. Simpson’s debut memoir, This Is Your Mother, which tells the story of the traumatic childhood Simpson and her sister endured as their mother battled illness, poverty, and a recurring cycle of evictions from increasingly run-down apartments and hotels. The book tells the story of Sallie Carol’s life, but also, as the title and opening sentences suggest, what it was like for the memoirist to grow up as her daughter.
It was a rough ride, to say the least. As a child, Simpson endured humiliations such as standing by “like a sad prop” as her mother pleaded with the cashier of a cafeteria restaurant to give them their food for free, and repeatedly seeing their belongings thrown out onto the street when the family is evicted. She must leave behind books and favorite dolls and toys as they are forced out of one dwelling after another. What makes matters worse is the fact that Sallie Carol is not without gifts and talents. After excelling in college, she married, became a middle-school science teacher, and earned a master’s degree in education. Then things started going downhill. Sallie Carol developed a brain tumor—the first of her four bouts of cancer—and divorced her unfaithful husband. After hearing a charismatic speaker at an educator’s conference, she started a business, Freedom Peace, Inc., to offer seminars on self-empowerment. Sallie Carol is a woman of great drive and faith in God, and she believes in following her dreams. Ultimately, Simpson recounts, “[s]he chooses her dream over the day-to-day, investing in Freedom Peace instead of paying rent.” Many of the family’s troubles are thus brought on by Sallie Carol’s lack of good judgment, which makes the family’s plight all the more heart-wrenching.
There are many memoirs about difficult childhoods, but This Is Your Mother stands out because of the power of Simpson’s voice, which balances her compassion and loyalty towards her mother with her own determination to create a stable and successful life for herself. Simpson’s memoir breaks new ground by creating a compelling mix of innovative prose techniques, sharply rendered dramatic scenes, and even, amid often grim events, a lingering sense of joy.
One striking feature of her prose is Simpson’s use of second-person narration for large portions of the book. Addressing the reader as “you” can be difficult to carry off for long stretches, but Simpson does it successfully, deploying this point of view in a couple of ways. At times, she uses “you” to create a friendly, confiding tone that invites the reader in, as in this passage early in the book: “If your mother is a devout Christian, like mine, she’ll raise you mostly by faith, which entails a great deal of hustling to make it to the next blessing.” At other times, the second-person narration allows Simpson to distance herself slightly from the exceedingly painful memories she shares, as if she were talking to herself. An example is this passage recounting a telephone call in which her mother, sick and evicted from her latest residence, calls to ask for money: “Your body shakes beneath the covers as you search for what to say. If you don’t send her the money she’ll have no place to go!”
As is common nowadays in the creative nonfiction landscape, Simpson uses a variety of “container” forms (such as lists and scripts) and real-life artifacts (such as voicemails, emails, and letters) to help tell her story. Simpson’s innovations are unusually dramatic and entertaining, including a sermon, quasi-Biblical verses from an imagined “Book of Sallie Carol,” and—especially humorous—a script for the television program, “Beyond Belief,” hosted by Jonathan Frakes. Simpson received her MFA from the University of Kentucky and was awarded the program’s 2021 MFA Award in Nonfiction but, as a girl, she aspired to be a Hollywood star, and she studied for a year in a theatrical program at DePaul University. Her theatrical flair shines brightly in her writing.
Simpson also has a gift for rendering suspenseful and dramatic scenes in her nonfiction prose. One unforgettable incident from her childhood involves multiple taxi rides and trips to Walmart and culminates with her mother being arrested on an outstanding warrant, as a terrified young Erika looks on.
The book’s narrative shifts back and forth in time between Simpson’s childhood and 2013, the memoir’s present, when Simpson is an adult living on her own and her mother is in Atlanta, having received a final diagnosis that her cancer is back and she has only months to live. At times, these shifts can be confusing, causing the reader to struggle to figure out which era is being described. For the most part, however, Simpson carries the reader propulsively along as she tells the story of her mother’s death and her own quest to keep moving forward and forge her own path.
Simpson’s voice is a marvel in this book: warm, intimate, humorous, and deeply compassionate and loving toward her mother, even as the author realizes she must escape from the “suffocating” ties of her mother’s misfortunes. And indeed, as we learn through the course of the book, it was Sallie Carol herself who encouraged both her daughters to pursue education and follow their dreams. “Yes, I support your dreams and probably dream with you at times,” Sallie Carol wrote in a letter to the author. “You are remarkable, powerful, and forever loved.”
If Simpson’s childhood was a rough ride, her memoir is an exhilarating one, showing just how powerful the alchemy of artistic creation can be.
Josephine Greenfield lives and writes in Lexington, Kentucky. She has worked as a newspaper reporter, a technical editor, and a tree farmer at her family’s farm outside of Paris, Kentucky. She is currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction through the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.