The author of this absorbing, near-tragic, in places hilarious memoir was born into a family possessing nearly every advantage: great wealth, intellectual brilliance, artistic talent and (as photographs attest)beauty. The lives of the women of the family, however, were thrown radically off track into near wreckage by their addiction to Freudian analysis. The author was analyzed into sexual activity in her early teens,long before she was ready for it; then analyzed into a wretched marriage; then told to accept her subordinate female role as handmaiden to male genius and forget her own supposedly neurotic artistic ambitions.While Webster describes movingly the dismaying self-doubts she lived with during those years,she also mentions that she was raising three children, getting a doctorate, writing two scholarly books that got her great professional respect in high places (though she was a housewife, not an academician)and then becoming a distinctive and admired novelist. Not a bad record for a supposedly helpless, dysfunctional emotional invalid; Webster mentions her achievements in a modest,just-giving-the-news manner.In the end she says she has won a happy life, for her family and herself; it is a tough wrestle,though, and the reader feels she has earned what she achieves, in spades. The accounts of her adventures with psychiatrists are sometimes uproarious, and the reader--if at a safe distance from the analyst's couch--will surely laugh out loud.

Brenda Webster, in this beautifully written, wrenchingly poignant, and highly fascinating memoir, tells of growing up in a world where her ordinary and not so ordinary life events were, at the behest of her brilliant and wacky mother, routinely scrutinized by Freudian psychoanalyists. Her memoir reads like the very best of novels. I found myself entranced by her story, mouth open in shock, heart pounding in indignation and fighting back tears. Readers interested in memoirs, in psychoanalysis, in coming of age novels, or in cults will find this a fascinating read.

Brenda Webster's Paradise Farm is a page turner. Each page reveals a little more of the inner lives of people living in a time that, in retrospect, was extraordinary. It was 1929, before the stock market crash but not before Mein Kampf. It was a time of change for women, for art, and for human explorations of the mind. Within this maelstrom, a Jewish family--Agnes, the mother, and Lara and Johnnie, grown daughter and son--move on after the death of husband and father Eugene. They confront what it is to be Jewish and what they have meant to each other. Johnnie's journey is marked by his prescient grasp of the threat of Hitler, a insight that is largely ignored by those around him. Agnes emerges from Eugene's shadow. Will she find, as she puts it, something to do with the rest of her life? Lara struggles to define herself as an artist while experimenting with new sexual freedoms. The least compelling aspect of this novel is its portrayal of Lara's relationships with the various men in her life, whether brother, lover, or would-be-lover. No relationship, even the crucial and incestuous one with Johnnie, is developed to the point that the reader can really understand or care about it. Her departed father's influence on her burgeoning art, however, is convincingly woven into her development as a painter. By the end of the year in which Eugene dies, Agnes and her children have all left home--their Paradise Farm. And we have been given a glimpse into a family fettered by sexual infidelity and incest. This is a tale of what we now call a dysfunctional family at a pivotal point in their lives. Lara provides the principal lens through which we view this family and their times. In its intimate portrayal of her growth as an artist first, and then as a woman, Paradise Farm is a story for every contemporary woman who has ever asked how family and work fit together in her life.