Like the protagonist, Burstow is a daughter of survivors who is a professor at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (Toronto). One of her agendas in this novel is to reveal the effect of trauma on subsequent generations.  The text is full of Yiddish words and idiom capturing the flavor of conversation and story-telling in a first-generation Jewish home. Another agenda is feminist, in its recounting of the past and in the on-going travails of the present--almost all of which are generated by men against women. The heroic mother, who is violently (and inexplicably) opposed to psychiatry, decides to make a rational suicide, for which she demands the blessing of all three of her daughters. 

The author is an anti-psychiatry activist. Her novel suggests an autobiographical theme and may hint at the origins of her convictions.