"In The Voice of the Mother, Jo Malin argues that many twentieth-century autobiographies by women contain an intertext, an embedded narrative, which is a biography of the writer/daughter's mother.".

"Analyzing this narrative practice, Malin examines ten texts by women who seem particularly compelled to tell their mothers' stories. Each author is, in fact, able to write her own autobiography only by using a narrative form that contains her mother's story at its core. These texts raise interesting questions about autobiography as a genre and about a feminist writing practice that resists and subverts the dominant literary tradition.".

"Malin theorizes a hybrid form of autobiographical narrative containing an embedded narrative of the mother. This alternative narrative practice - in which the daughter attempts to talk both to her mother and about her - is equally an autobiography and a biography rather than one or the other. The technique is marked by a breakdown of subject/object categories as well as auto/biographical dichotomies of genre. Each text contains a "self" that is more plural than singular, yet neither."--BOOK JACKET.