It's a long time since I have read a happy Mothers and Daughters book. Honestly, decades. How can this be? Most of the mothers I know have great relationships with their daughters. Yet current fiction does not support this view, and I have the books to prove it:
Let's start with Vivian Gornick's biographical account of life with her mother - Fierce Attachments. Well, the title says it all really. Two lippy women living in the Bronx without the balancing household presence of any y chromosomes. The daughter: sharp-tongued and sexually adventurous, the mother: conservative and grieving the loss of her husband. Their best moments come when they walk the streets of their beloved New York.
Moving right on to Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, where things become that bit more curdled. Take one controlling, difficult-to-please mother, add a "finding herself" daughter and a dodgy medical practice. Transport them all to foreign soil, leave to simmer in the heat, stir occasionally - then prepare to dodge the fallout. Deborah Levy was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2016 for this very readable novel.
My Name is Lucy Barton also has ill health as a trigger point for a dysfunctional mother/daughter relationship. It's a small novel, set almost entirely in a New York hospital room, in which Lucy and her mother attempt to nut out their history. This book made me the most sad, because the real culprit in their story was poverty and its effect on families. It also makes one aware that sometimes, even when great efforts are being made, things do not always work out. In fact Elizabeth Strout is something of a specialist on the theme of strained mothers and daughters. Her highly acclaimed first novel Amy and Isabelle also tackles this topic.
A family is a tyranny ruled over by its weakest member
said George Bernard Shaw. This may well be true, but I won't know for sure until I have reacquainted myself with some good strong Happy Families books. Does such a thing even exist?
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