An intellectual and personal reckoning with a very particular unease about what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a daughter. ´Rich and moving´ New York Times ´A book that expands and breaks your heart´ Adelle Waldman A revelatory enquiry into selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother´s daughter During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome. So begins Michelle Orange´s extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy - in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother´s many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review, about her midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city. A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called ´the great unwritten story´: that of the mother-daughter bond. Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it.