Bad Bad Girl

The award-winning author of The Resisters returns with an engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .

Gish’s mother—Loo Shu-hsin—is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same reprimand: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally minded education. Still, her father would say, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an… Keep Reading