mothers – findingtimetowrite

Over-Identifying with Fictional Creations and the Slippery Nature of Memory

CW: Largely personal musing, so look away now if autobiographical confessions are not your thing.

It is not unusual to be struck by a feeling of sadness when you finish a book or a film, whether you loved it or not. If you didn’t like it much, the sadness may be more of a rage-filled kind, that you wasted so many minutes or hours of your life engaging with it. If you loved it, you may wonder how to find a book that can follow on from it, without disappointing you.

Alberto Manguel, whose wonderful book Packing My Library I’m currently reading (just as I start packing my own library), has another explanation for this melancholy feeling. Based on the apocryphal quote from Aristotle (or perhaps Galen) that ‘after intercourse all animals are sad’, Manguel then broadens it out: ‘Perhaps all intercourse – with pictures, with books, with people, with the virtual inhabitants of cyberspace – breeds sadness because it reminds us that, in the end, we are alone.

Yet, in a way, this sadness might also arise because it reminds us that we are not alone, that our experiences are not unique but have been shared by others. This is often my case, because I identify with certain aspects of a work of art too closely, because I am such a ‘gut reader/audience member/viewer/writer’, with emotions leading the way and cerebral wit limping after in a desperate game of catch-up. It might even open windows into parts of our lives and experiences that we had carefully locked away or reduced to a flippant image or sentence which makes the past bearable.

This is why I sometimes resist reading certain books where I know the subject matter could potentially be troubling, such as Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, although at other times I find the messy unravelling of a fictional character oddly soothing and preventative of my own unspooling, such as Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. This is why I perfectly understand the need for trigger warnings, although the very vagueness of those warnings make them essentially meaningless in my case. ‘Trigger warning: bad mothers’ means very little – in some contexts, I can cope with it fine and it even amuses or intrigues me, while in other situations it can make me regress to a sullen, rebellious, unhappy child.

Poster for the K drama Something in the Rain, featuring the obligatory umbrella

All of this is leading up to a case of no trigger warnings, as I settled down to watch yet another K drama. I wanted something a little lighter, more romantic after a few action-packed, tense thrillery type ones. So I dived into Something in the Rain without knowing too much about it, other than that it was a romance between a 35 year old woman who falls for the younger brother (about 29-30 years old) of her best friend, and described as a beautiful and haunting love story by Vishy. Sounds kinda fun, right? But alas, it turned out to be quite traumatic, and not just because I found some of the characters’ behaviours irritating, but because it brought up some traumatic memories from my own youth.

I should say that the ‘inappropriate age gap’ (not that significant in my eyes, but considered rather daring in some places) ends up being only a minor point in the series – this is no Aimez-vous Brahms, which had me bawling as a teenager (and would probably have me bawling even more now!). There is also a depressing thread about sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace, which is not satisfactorily resolved (or perhaps too realistically resolved). But most of all, it is about a narcissistic mother who cares too much about what others think and therefore tries to push her daughter into fulfilling her own expectations, as well as ineffectual or disengaged fathers who cannot provide you with any role models – and a woman who is a bit too dependent on other people’s opinions of her, too much a people-pleaser and a pushover, has been perhaps a little too brainwashed by traditional expectations even as she tries to push against them, and therefore makes amazingly bad, often childish decisions.

Asian parents are often overbearing and justify it as ‘it’s all for your own good and own future’, but they don’t have the monopoly on aggressive interference – Romanian parents can be just as bad! Perhaps there is some cognitive dissonance there in societies with more ‘traditional’ values that have experienced very rapid modernisation and Westernisation. However, I did feel frustrated that this 35 year old living in 2014 could still be so brainwashed by her parents – then again, I do wonder how I’d have fared if I’d had to live close to my mother for the remainder of my life.

Photo of 18 year old me, taken by my skier boyfriend (see below)

My mother has also interfered in almost every relationship I ever had (or at least the ones she knew about), occasionally calling in for reinforcements from my clueless but every-now-and-then patriarchal father. Although painful at all stages in life, at least we’ve had the whole continent of Europe dividing us for the past 20+ years and a phone call that can be ended at any point when things get too much. However, things were much more difficult back when I was 18-19, in my final year of high school and first year of university, and I was still living at home and financially almost completely dependent on my parents (the money I was making as a tourist guide was barely enough to cover my summer holiday expenses). I recently heard from my high school sweetheart that she threatened him with the vice police (although, ironically, I was the older one by a few months, so it could be claimed that I led him astray!) – all the more galling to him, since I’d just ended things with him a couple of weeks prior to their meeting.

I had a long list of grievances against her which I thought I’d distanced myself from by now (her reading my diaries, intercepting letters from boyfriends, following me on the streets when I was accompanied home late at night etc.). I’d forgotten (or rather, glossed over) most of the details. Memory can be selective like that for our own protection – once a certain scene or person can be reduced to just a couple of traits or lines of dialogue, it becomes safer to handle.

During that conversation with my high school boyfriend, I contradicted him when he remembered certain of my statements from that time. With my wiser, more mature and freedom-loving head on, I couldn’t believe that I’d been such a slave to convention during my teens. So I went back to my diaries – and discovered that he really does have a photographic memory, while in my head I edited my teen angst and beliefs to something more palatable, more in line with my later way of thinking. Post-processing, I believe they call this in the film world! 😉

But what I also discovered in those diaries is that I had a very similar story of giving in to my parents’ whims and thus finally exasperating and losing one of the men I loved most in my life. My only excuse is that I was very young at the time. He was a skier of Hungarian origin, member of the Romanian Olympic team, and therefore almost constantly away at training camp. Although there was no age gap to worry about, my parents hated everything else about him. He was too good-looking (therefore obviously a womaniser), he was an ethnic Hungarian (therefore potentially jealous and possessive), he was too preoccupied with sport (therefore uneducated), he was always staying in hotels in training camps (therefore I might run off to meet him in places they could not control and invigilate). Above all, he was dangerous – he might distract me from my studying for the entrance exams at university, and he might get me pregnant (which was admittedly a hazardous undertaking in Ceausescu’s Romania where contraception and abortions were banned). My mother was constantly opening all the letters that arrived for me with a postmark from any of the mountain resorts (some of them were not from him) and interfered to the point where he was in danger of losing his place on the national team.

During the first few weeks at university, me pretending to kneel in front of one of my fellow students in the Japanese department.

We struggled against all odds for nearly a year and a half, but in the end he could no longer bear the fact that I was either unable or unwilling to fight for him and sent me a very hurtful break-up letter, lashing out like a cornered animal. The truth is that, mad as I was about the boy, I could not envisage a long-term relationship with him and had prepared my own break-up letter for him, which I never got to send: ‘Surely it’s better to cut things off now with a sharp axe than to hack at it endlessly with a blunt kitchen knife!’

To this day it’s not entirely clear to me whether this was because I was a snob (our department at university had the reputation of being extremely high-falutin’), or because I realised that what bound us was primarily physical attraction. The curated memory tended towards the latter explanation, but my diaries show much more inner turmoil, as well as sweet moments of complicity and compatibility that my subsequent pain had managed to completely erase from my memory. They also show me as a vacillating, annoying, clueless young woman who was far too much of a people-pleaser, a little too brainwashed by traditional expectations and who rebelled in silly, ineffectual, childish ways.

Hmmm, that rings a bell…

Children and Parents in Literature

Sometimes it’s serendipity and sometimes it’s your subconscious deliberately selecting books which speak to your innermost needs and fears. I’m going through a bout of reading about mothers and children (occasionally fathers are involved too, but it’s mostly mothers and sons I’ve been eavesdropping on). Fiction has always provided me with more inspiration than any number of self-help books.

Patrick Ness: A Monster Calls

The sinister black and white illustrations by Kay perfectly match this story about a 13-year-old boy whose mother is dying. Conor’s deadpan refusal to be impressed or frightened by the monster is realistic and brings a note of fierce humour in what could otherwise be a very bleak story about denial, anger and ultimately acceptance of loss. As for that final dialogue between Conor and his mother – oh, my! I borrowed it from the library with the intention of giving it to my children to read, but after emerging from it a tear-stricken mess, I decided better not. Not just now.

Louise Beech: The Mountain in My Shoe

A chilling tale of parental neglect and the difficulties of navigating the social care system, seen through the eyes of a young boy (also called Conor, incidentally). The ‘lifebook’ is an inspired method for conveying all the different stories and voices present in Conor’s life, and the quite dry factual content of many of the entries merely make the sadness all the more palpable, while avoiding sentimentality. The title of the book comes from a statement that the little boy makes around the Muhammad Ali quote: ‘It’s not the mountains ahead which wear you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe’ – and Conor has a whole mountain in his shoe. Luckily, there is also much love in the boy’s life through the three mother figures, although they don’t always know how to express it.

Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

An example of Tessa Hadley’s subtle humour, choosing a title like Clever Girl and then proceeding to show us how her main protagonist, Stella, demonstrates a lack of ‘cleverness’ by making what many might perceive as the ‘wrong choices’ and ending up with quite a difficult life as a result of it. Yet, as the story progresses and Stella’s two sons grow up, we realise that perhaps we need to rethink our definition of ‘clever’, as she ultimately succeeds in raising happy and reasonably well-adjusted children, and achieves some sort of contentment herself. Of course, there is also the slightly patronising tone of ‘clever girl’, which you might utter to a dog performing tricks… A writer who is simply masterly at elevating the mundane detail and making it appear full of significance, while also providing a great insight into character.

Romain Gary: La promesse de l’aube (Promise at Dawn)

I will do a more detailed review of this book in another post, as it has been every bit as wonderful as Emma promised. For now, let me just say that I adored this mother but would dread to become like her. Not quite a memoir (although autobiographical, it has been fictionally heightened in parts for the utmost effect), it is largely the story of Romain’s arrival in France as a refugee with his mother. Above all, it is about motherly love and self-sacrifice, about her unbridled belief in her son’s glorious future, and that son’s attempts not to let her down. In this book, Gary pays tribute to a larger-than-life character who pushed him to so many achievements later in life. It is beautifully written – tender, passionate, like an informal conversation with a friend, very poignant at times, and also very funny and self-deprecating.

To this set of imperfect, absolutely human mothers, now also add the stage version of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, in which a mother can no longer cope with her ‘difficult’ child, and the effect this has on the entire family. I just watched that on Saturday with my own children and what do you get? ‘No, I’m NOT crying, I just have to blow my nose because I have a cold, all right?’

Liane Moriarty: Big Little Lies

I’m a latecomer to the charms of Australian writer Liane Moriarty’s slick, compelling novels. Winner of the 2015 Davitt Award for Australian crime fiction for adults, Big Little Lies was originally published as just Little Lies in the UK, just to confuse matters further. I saw it being highly praised by bloggers I trust, like Cleo, That’s What She Read , TripFiction, Elena and on the Shiny New Books site. Margot even featured Big Little Lies in her ‘In the Spotlight’ series, which gave me the final push to pick it up at the local library.

It is perfect for parents everywhere, although the Australian setting gives it an extra twist. [No hedge fund manager parent in Britain would have sent their child to the local state school.] Anyone who’s taken a child to school in recent years will laugh or wince in recognition: the author packs in so many cringeworthy moments – the yummy mummies and their gossip, the PTA power, the party invitations being handed out in the playground, the petitions going round the school, the overwhelmed teachers and principals. It’s perfect book club fodder: there’s even a book club featured in its pages! And I love the expression: ‘Oh, calamity!’

Yet underneath the humour and instantly recognisable ‘types of parents’, there is real drama, tragedy and moments of subtle psychological insight. I detected a certain similarity in style with fellow Australian Helen Fitzgerald: fearless, candid, humorous but underlying seriousness. In this book it’s all about bullying and lying (to one’s self and to others), about maintaining a façade when your heart is breaking, about the everyday worries so many of us experience and yet we have to carry on. The characterisation is pitch-perfect. I could perhaps relate to the warm-hearted but sometimes terribly interfering and loud Madeline slightly more than to her two friends, shy Jane and inexplicably vague golden girl Celeste, but I enjoyed reading from each character’s point of view and even secondary characters revealed unexpected depths.

The most memorable recent books I’ve read which fit into this category are: Claire Mackintosh’s I See You, Sabine Durrant’s Lie With Me, Tammy Cohen’s When She Was Bad. They rely not so much on plot twists and gradual reveal (although they all have them), but on the ‘chattiness factor’. I have a theory about why books such as these are so popular. I call them ‘chat crime’ (to coin a new phrase) and they straddle comfortably genres such as chick lit and psychological thriller. They are the comfort food of crime fiction: enough suspense and mystery to keep you turning the pages, but also recognisable situations galore, characters in predicaments which you can relate to. Easy, smooth style, slides down the reading throat a treat, and very moreish. You feel you could read another one like it in quick succession. I also wonder what percentage of readers of psychological thrillers are women between the ages of 26 and 46 of a certain level of education and affluence, who will recognise themselves very easily in these pages. It feels like the stories we all tell each other when we get together on a ‘Mums’ night out’.

Pirriwee Beach is fictional, but Palm Beach in New South Wales comes pretty close to what I imagine it to be like.

I am by no means belittling this kind of crime fiction. I enjoyed it immensely (and cried a little at the tales of Madeline’s woes with Abigail, her teenage daughter from her previous marriage) and read it in just one day. And we all know that the prose which feels most ‘natural’ and ‘unworked upon’ is the hardest to write! I’m just aware that I need to alternate this kind of reading with other, more challenging literature (written from points of view which are less familiar to me). Otherwise it’s just too easy to get trapped in your protected little bubble, like the parents of Pirriwee Public School.

I hear the book is being filmed as a TV mini-series, featuring Nicole Kidman as the statuesque Celeste, Shailene Woodley as fearful Jane and Reese Witherspoon as feisty Madeline.

Reading with a Theme: Bad Mothers

Every now and then I happen to read a couple of books with a similar theme and then I am tempted to seek out a few more with the same theme. So I end up with a mix of fiction and non-fiction, memoir and even poetry about a topic, which gets me thinking about my own thoughts, feelings and experiences. This time the topic was: bad mothers. Or perhaps it should be called just ‘mothers’, since, as a friend of mine often says:

No matter what you do or don’t do as a mother, you will get blamed for everything anyway.

Paula Daly: Just What Kind of Mother Are You? – may be a question most mothers ask themselves at some point during their lives (or at least once a week in my case), but the mother in question is relatively blameless compared to the ones I’ll mention below. Lisa Kallisto: she was just so overwhelmed – this is what it will say on her headstone. And who cannot relate to that? We can all empathise with her as she tries to juggle work and family life, so many plates to keep spinning. Is it any wonder that one of them may occasionally fall? Yet when one of those ‘plates’ is the daughter of your friend, who was supposed to be staying for a sleepover with your own daughter, but now has disappeared, is it any wonder you blame yourself? A seriously addictive page-turner, because it is so relatable for any mother.

Mother Mother by Koren Zailckas has been described as crime fiction, but really it’s not the mystery which keeps you reading. It’s the sheer horror of an incredibly dysfunctional family. Yet this too offers searing moments of recognition. I wish I could say I view these moments with humour (or shocked dismay), but in fact they rip open scabs on wounds I had long thought healed. Or wounds that I’ve refused to acknowledge thus far, wounds which I thought I had inflicted on myself. Although I usually despise labels and their limitations, it does help that I now have a name for something which may be involuntary, a kind of illness rather than deliberate malevolence: narcissistic mother. And no, I’m not talking about myself!

There is a lot of melodrama in this book, deliberate switching of viewpoints to increase the suspense, but they also help to provide a more rounded picture of Josephine, the mother in question. A monster? Yes, perhaps, but not entirely unappealing, even if her young son Will is perhaps not the most reliable of narrators. But then, who is? I would ideally have liked to see how outsiders perceived her – we only have a hint of that with the comments of the social worker who comes to talk to daughter Violet at the hospital.

This is not an easy book to read, it’s a painful dissection of dysfunctional families and the ways in which we torture and manipulate each other (sometimes with the best of intentions). I found the portrayal of Will and the ineffective husband/father particularly well written. Too little too late comes to mind, and I shudder to think how the reverberations of the events described in this book will continue to affect the protagonists for many years still to come.

Anna Gold : Bienvenue (in French)

At the bedside of her dying mother, the narrator, Léa Blum, seeks to come to terms with her Jewish heritage and her estranged family. A story as old as the hills – the teenage girl who rebels against her upbringing, finds an unsuitable boyfriend (in this case, unsuitable because he is not Jewish) and falls pregnant. Yet the way in which the full extent of her mother’s betrayal is gradually revealed is particularly painful. Léa repeatedly tries to break through her mother’s coldness and lovelessness, tries to understand and forgive it as a trait of a Holocaust survivor, but finally she gives up. She seeks refuge instead in her literary creation, Sonia van Zijde, a Dutch Marrano Jew living in 17^th century Amsterdam, who becomes friends with Rembrandt and his wife Saskia, and through them gets to know the philosopher Spinoza. The contrast between the multiple lives of the narrator: the one she was expected to live, the one she did live and the one she would have liked to live, all meet here, as we alternate between Sonia’s story and her own. Perhaps a little predictable as a story, but it ends on a hopeful note.

Delphine de Vigan: Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit (to be translated and published soon as ‘Nothing Holds Back the Night’)

This is not a Mommy Dearest portrayal of a monster, but a daughter and a writer trying to understand and interpret her own childhood, that of her mother, the mother’s manic depression and an unusual but rather attractive family. There is a lot of love and forgiveness in this book, a lot of painful honesty, as well as a meditation on whether we can ever be truthful in our representations of reality, or just how reliable memory is. Unlike all of the other books on this theme, this is most resolutely memoir rather than fiction (however thinly disguised some of the other fiction is). Of course memoir is interpretation, it is fiction too, and this book is not just a family history and the portrait of a troubled mother, but also a meditation on the nature of memory, of how stories are constructed and retold, of the power and dangers of silence. Out of all the conflicting family accounts from her mother’s brothers and sisters, which will the author choose as ‘the truth’? And ultimately, is there ever a single truth, can we ever know what drives a person to despair, depression and suicide?

Delphine’s mother Lucile was a beautiful child model, the third child in a large and apparently picture-perfect family. Yet the family was touched by tragedy: the childhood death of a younger brother was just the start. Lucile marries far too early, has children when she is barely out of her teens and soon finds herself struggling to make a life for herself and her daughters as a largely uneducated single mother in Paris. As her moodiness and occasional sadness descends into delusions and paranoia, the girls struggle to anticipate her behaviour and surmount their own fears. Could anything or anyone have saved Lucile from suicide? Could her life have been better? And can we ever doubt her love for her children?

For a more detailed review of this book, see this fantastic blog.

Claire King: The Night Rainbow

Another depressed mother, another account of a potentially damaged childhood, this time a fictional story seeped in the sun of Southern France, as seen through the eyes of a precocious child narrator, Pea (nearly six). This could be a very dark and sad book in terms of subject matter: the rather horrific neglect of Pea and her younger sister Margot, the infuriating apathy of a severely depressed, heavily pregnant mother struggling to overcome her own grief, the well-meant interference of other villagers, the hilarious but also dangerous scrapes the girls get themselves into (a scorpion in a jar, a haircut which goes terribly wrong). Yet all of these are counter-balanced by a delicious freedom and poetic description of country life which few children are able to enjoy nowadays. The smells, sounds, textures of the fields of hay, of the market-place, the taste of freshly-picked peaches, the breathless run through to the treehouse. It was a book filled with nostalgia, just like the de Vigan book, evoking a lost paradise (the days when Papa was alive and Maman still used to laugh, hug and cook), but here we are allowed to hope in a better ending, an improved life for all.

Have you read any of these books or others about ‘bad mothers’? And how do you feel about themed reading? Does it get too much after a while to read about the same topic, or is it fascinating to see the many different takes on it? Motherhood is one of those topics which never gets stale (although in this case it did get a bit depressing, even if I interspersed them with other reading), nor will it ever be elucidated. Complex, mysterious, complicated, joyous and troubling: our relationship with our mother is one topic which is never likely to disappear from literature.