How long does it take to read My Mother's Keeper?
B. D. Hyman
My Mother's Keeper by B. D. Hyman takes about 5 hours 44 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 44 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1985. 313 pages, about 86,075 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 34 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 44 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 35 minutes |
The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
According to the author, the Mother Goddam of movies for four decades was something else offscreen. The paranoid figure saw herself as a feminine version of Gulliver. "Never relax," she warned B.D., "or the Lilliputians will climb up your legs and devour your soul." No defect goes uncharted, from the star's alcoholism to violent maledictions from her fourth husband, Actor Gary Merrill: "The only people who can be around you for long without wanting to kill you are faggots." Physical catastrophes of old age, among them strokes and a mastectomy, follow like biblical punishments. If pity is contained in these pages, it is intended for the author, not her subject. B.D. now lives in the Bahamas, 3,000 miles from Hollywood, but My Mother's Keeper has distanced her even further from her mother, and from reticence and common decency.
Subjects: Mothers and daughters, Biography, Motion picture actors and actresses, Mères et filles
