Booklist Starred Review of Strange Situation
“No. Get Mom.” Those three words, from a childhood memory of a time when Saltman’s father poked his head in the bathroom while she was taking a bath, had always haunted her. Were they evidence of a repressed history of abuse? Certainly, her childhood wasn’t the happiest—picked on by her two brothers, with a mother who seemed distant, Saltman would act out in her teen years, everything from drinking to drugs and sex. But when her own daughter is born, Saltman is completely enamored and at the same time undone, resolving to make their mother-daughter relationship different from what hers had been. This fascinating mix of memoir and the history of a major revolution in the scientific theory of the relationships we form in our first year of life, centers around the “strange situation,” a 20-minute laboratory procedure that was developed in 1963. The procedure was first developed as an afterthought, an accompaniment to a series of home case studies with mothers and infants by psychology researcher Mary Ainsworth. In the decades since, it has formed the basis of thousands of studies globally. Saltman examines attachment research into the bonds between infants and their caregivers as part of her own journey of discovery into what problems in her childhood might mean for her understanding of the past and her daughter’s future.
— Bridget Thoreson
