'With or Without You' Reveals The Dark Side Of Mother-Daughter Relationship

Domenica Ruta uses her new memoir, With or Without You, as a way to recover from the emotional scars left behind by her mother, Kathi, and examine their troubled relationship.

Kathi could be described as an inconsistent mother: at times good, and others bad. She is loud and impulsive. She was a single mother living on welfare, obsessed with buying everything she wanted, but didn’t need. She loved her one and only daughter, as any mother would love her daughter. Kathi was the type of woman who believed it was more important to be an interesting person than it was to be a good individual. She was the type of mother who pushed for her daughter’s education, encouraging her to enroll in the Andover — but she paid for the school by selling cocaine. She urged her daughter to skip school so that they could watch movies together and, while being addicted to drugs, introduced her ten-year-old daughter to OxyContin.

Most of the story takes place during Domenica’s childhood in Danver, Mass., during the 80s. Ruta opens the memoir with a scene in which she and her mother are trying to break a woman’s windshield, already introducing her mother as an erratic woman. The story generally progresses with Ruta’s age. Despite her mother’s impulsive ways, Ruta’s love for her mother was inevitable, as she describes her attachment to Kathi like that of a plant leaning towards the brightest of sunlight. As a young girl, Ruta was unable to understand all of her mother’s misdeeds, and even got used to being called a "cunt" by her own mother.

Kathi ignores her daughter’s complaint that one of her friends is a pedophile. She gives her daughter a bag of weed for Christmas, and she starts encouraging Ruta to get pregnant while she is in school. At the same time, Kathi is protective of Ruta, assuring her that she is the only true friend she will ever have. As Ruta reaches her adolescent years, she starts feeling embarrassed not by Kathi, but for her, and her mother’s behavior starts taking a toll. Ruta finds herself becoming sick of her, even wanting her to die, and Ruta slowly begins to drive her away until one day, Ruta shuts her out of her life for good while away at college. Ruta would later take to alcohol in her attempt to both forget and remember her mother. She eventually was convinced to become sober.

Ruta’s personality comes alive through the words on the page. She is blunt, sharp, full of emotion and has a dark sense of humor that is very likeable. Kathi, too, is captured quite well and as I read I started to hear loud compulsive voice. With or Without You is so strongly written that I could even hear the creak of the door downstairs as Kathi walks into the house and her loud heavy footsteps.

This is story of a daughter who, despite her love, has become sick of her own mother. Domenica Ruta grew up attached to her mother as a child, unable to imagine her life without her. Now, Ruta chooses to live a life without her. Forgetting her and moving past those memories has proven to be more than difficult. It has been six years since Ruta has last seen or spoken to her mother. This is the story of two women in need of recovery. Ruta has found recovery through her writing. Kathi never did.