50 Ways to Leave your Mother

50 Ways to Leave your Mother
Chris Salditt
Mother Love Publishing Company
ISBN: 0-9778178-9-X
Nonfiction, Self Help, How To
Reviewed by Ernest Dempsey

We have here a wonderful, small, illustrated book that is pleasantly unusual in design and carries tips for becoming independent just before bidding farewell to your mom’s house. Chris Salditt mentors young people who are about to live independently, moving in a new place, and encounter the daily life’s demands directly. Whether these are things as minor as using your tooth brush or as urgent as managing a whole life’s budget, the book offers invaluable advice. It covers relationships, choosing roommates, food matters, travel expenses, insurance, and virtually everything that keeps life running.
The tips included in the book are not only significant from practical life’s viewpoint but are also very enjoyable. Salditt speaks informally with lighthearted humor. We hear her advising us to ‘spray some disinfectant in a few strategic places-kitchen, bathroom, your armpits.’ But of course she remembers to remind us that the armpit thing is a joke.
Having successfully launched her two daughters to independence, Salditt has done a nice job by authoring 50 Ways to Leave your Mother so that those turning eighteen and moving out of their parental house do not come crying back to mom’s doorstep and hide in their funk hole for another two hundred years. And certainly, the book is not for a teenage readership only; it is for all who want to live an independent life.