page_title: Mom & Me & Mom
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Mom & Me & Mom / Background
caption_attribution_description: President Barack Obama presenting Maya Angelou with the Presidential Medal of Freedom
context_page_description: Mom & Me & Mom is the seventh and final book in author Maya Angelou's series of autobiographies. The book was published shortly before Mother's Day and Angelou's 85th birthday. It focuses, for the first time in her books, on Angelou's relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter. The book explains Baxter's behavior, especially Baxter's abandonment of Angelou and Angelou's older brother when they were young children, and fills in "what are possibly the final blanks in Angelou's eventful life". The book also chronicles Angelou's reunion and reconciliation with Baxter.
  Mom & Me & Mom is an overview of Angelou's life and revisits many of the same anecdotes she relates in her previous books. The first section, entitled "Mom & Me", centers on Angelou's early years, before the age of 17, and her transition from resentment and distrust of her mother to acceptance, support, and love towards her. After Baxter helps her through the birth of her son, Angelou goes from calling Baxter "Lady" to "Mom".
context_section_description: Mom & Me & Mom (2013) is the seventh of Maya Angelou's series of autobiographies.  It was completed 11 years after the publication of her previous autobiography, A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), and over thirty years after she wrote her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).  Mom & Me & Mom, in which Angelou relates her relationship with her mother Vivian Baxter, was published shortly before Mother's Day and Angelou's 85th birthday.  In the time period between the publication of her sixth and seventh autobiographies, Angelou was the first African-American woman and living poet selected by Sterling Publishing, who placed 25 of her poems in a volume of their Poetry for Young People series in 2004. In 2009, Angelou wrote "We Had Him", a poem about Michael Jackson, which was read by Queen Latifah at his funeral,  and wrote "His Day is Done", a poem honoring Nelson Mandela after his death in 2013.  She published a book of essays, Letter to My Daughter, in 2009, and two cookbooks, Hallelujah! The Welcome Table in 2004 and Great Food, All Day Long in 2010.  During this period, she was awarded the Lincoln Medal in 2008 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
  Angelou had become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women and was, as scholar Joanne Braxton has stated, "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer".  She had also become "a major autobiographical voice of the time".  Angelou was one of the first African-American female writers to publicly discuss her personal life, and one of the first to use herself as a central character in her books.  Writer Julian Mayfield, who called her first autobiography "a work of art that eludes description", stated that Angelou's series set a precedent not only for other Black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole.  Scholar Hilton Als called Angelou one of the "pioneers of self-exposure", willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices.  For example, while Angelou was composing her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute.  Her husband Paul Du Feu talked her into publishing the book by encouraging her to "tell the truth as a writer" and to "be honest about it".
  For the first time, Angelou focuses on her relationship with her mother in this book, and fills in what reviewer Fiona Sturges calls "possibly the final blanks in Angelou's eventful life".  According to Candace Smith, who reviewed the audio version of the book for Booklist, Angelou and Baxter's relationship was "touched upon but never fully described" in Caged Bird, but Mom & Me & Mom explains Baxter's actions, especially the reasons she sent Angelou and her older brother Bailey to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas.  The book also chronicles Angelou's initial uncomfortable reunion and eventual reconciliation with Baxter.  Pictures of Baxter, Angelou, and their family and close friends appear throughout the book and enhance the text.  An audio version of the book, read by Angelou, was released in CD form and as a digital download.
  Angelou explains in the book's prologue why she wrote the book, which was to explain how she became, despite being born poor, Black, and female, a renowned author and poet.  The book is divided into two sections: the first 13 chapters are grouped into the first section, called "Mom & Me", and the remaining chapters make up the second section, called "Me & Mom".  Angelou thanks her mother, "who generously taught me how to be a mother", which allowed her to dedicate the book to her son, Guy Bailey Johnson, whom she calls "one of the most courageous and generous men I know".
caption: President Barack Obama presenting Angelou with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2011
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