The Queen Gene — Jennifer Coburn

In this hip, outrageous, so-funny-and-true-it-hurts novel, Jennifer Coburn explores the ties that bind--and sometimes strangle--between mothers and daughters...

If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother.
"You are so lucky to have a mother like Anjoli." That's what all my friends say. But really, my friends weren't there when I was eight and my theatre-savvy, drama queen of a mother said she didn't want to take me to the Central Park Zoo because the animals didn't put on a good show. My mother is like a vapor: when she enters a room, she occupies every bit of space. Don't get me wrong--I adore my mom...from a distance. It's just, well, what can you say about a woman who takes her teacup Chihuahua to every new age healer in Manhattan, who has a living-beauty will so her eyebrows will still look great if she's in a coma, and who tells my cousin Kimmy that the sperm bank has too many rules and suggests a new lipstick and a train ride to Princeton instead?

To top it off, she calls me ten times a day to say, "Darling, I'm in crisis!" What, like I'm not? In addition to mothering my mother, I'm also trying to keep my marriage hot with a two-year-old under foot...babysitting the artists in residence at my Berkshires artists' colony, which seems to be the Bermuda Triangle of creativity but a breeding ground for seriously insane...resisting an attraction to a man so sexy he could give your eyeballs an orgasm...and trying to rid my 100-year-old home of mischievous ghosts. Yeah, sort of got my hands full. The way I see it, I've got two choices: go completely mad, or start living my own life on my own terms, starting with my mother. I'm just not sure which option is crazier...