Emily Adrian is determined to see her mother Ellen clearly. Part memoir, part autofiction, and part interview, Daughterhood charts a map of Ellen’s life before and after she became Emily’s mother. As a high schooler, Ellen lived alone in a trailer park on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. At eighteen, she had a job counting wild horses in the Steens Mountain Wilderness. She was engaged three times before her twenty-first birthday and finally married in the Salt Lake Temple—but her Mormon husband left her when he found her birth control pills. For the author, these stories were half-forgotten folklore until she had a child of her own. Overwhelmed and challenged by motherhood, Emily turns a novelistic eye toward the woman who raised her.