. . .Rebecca’s article is too sad to bear, and although I, too, have written about my troubled relationship with my mother, I did not have the heart to do so in a major way while she was alive. I waited until after her death to do so — and still I feared that I was both committing a sin and tempting fate. Exposing your mother’s nakedness in public, breaking publicly with the only woman who ever gave birth to you, is a tabooed, ungrateful, desperate, perhaps dangerous and always complicated act.

Phyllis Chesler, writing for Salon, covers the split between Alice Walker and her daughter, Rebecca Walker.