Don’t be put off by the title of this book if you have only sons. And it isn’t another how-to book about talented, flawless parents emerging from the tempestuous teenage years with astoundingly successful, perfect daughters.

These 15 short memoirs are by some of Australia’s most talented female writers, such as Michelle Law, Jane Caro and Susan Wyndham. The contributors intimately share their own rebellions as daughters of parents who imposed stifling cultural traditions, strict rules or inflexible expectations. There’s a lot to relate to in their struggles to forge separate identities from their parents and the emotional upheavals that the writers experienced.

The reasons for their rebellions vary greatly. Some escape from constricting religious or otherwise conservative backgrounds, and others flee the terrors of an unforgiving world akin to the horrors you would find in Grimms’ fairytales. The writers tell stories of fulfilling sexual longings against parental prohibitions, marrying too young, changing their make-up or style of clothing, or keeping bad company in seedy nightclubs. Writing the stories themselves can be an act of rebellion, accompanied by the guilt that the writer feels in exposing their parents’ restrictions. Timelines of the rebellions also vary. Some rebel early, but others are still defying parents and finding their identities in their 40s.

But acts of rebellion can come at a high cost, often leading to estrangement within families. Ties are broken, but they can be repaired in unexpected ways, such as when Lee Kofman took her sexually inhibited mother to a Sexpo convention, or when Eliza-Jane Henry-Jones behaved with patience and kindness when confronted with the dementia of her father and the forgetfulness of her mother, instead of manifesting the ferocious response she had once meted out to her Alzheimer’s-stricken grandmother.

Easy to read, painfully honest, yet interspersed with wry humour, these engrossing memoirs sensitively describe parents, daughters, sisters and grandparents with snappy dialogue and a fast pace.

Judith Grace