Incontinent on the Continent
My Mother, Her Walker, and Our Grand Tour of Italy

In this travelogue of self-discovery, Jane Christmas brings her wickedly irreverent style to a new mother-daughter experience. Since the beginning of time, mothers and daughters have had notoriously fraught relationships. "Show me a mother who says she has a good or great relationship with her daughter," Jane Christmas writes, "and I'll show you a daughter who is in therapy trying to understand how it all went so horribly wrong." To smooth over five decades of constant clashing, Christmas takes her arthritic, incontinent, and domineering mother, Valeria - a cross between Queen Victoria and Hyacinth Bucket of the British comedy Keeping Up Appearances - on a tour of Italy. Neither has been to Italy before, but both are fans of ancient art, architecture, and history. Will gazing at the fruits of the Italian R