Also, much as Violet uses drugs, I did a lot of binge drinking in an effort to numb out the family pain. I didn’t quite realise it when I wrote my memoir Smashed, but I think binge drinking was a subconscious effort to kill myself in a way that could pass for accidental and socially acceptable (at least for a teenager and college student). A dysfunctional family can feel like a life sentence, and I just couldn’t see any other way out.
I think that helpless feeling probably inspired Violet’s sallekhana, the Jain ritual of starving yourself to death. She’s definitely playing with eating disorders (a lot of children of narcissistic parents do). But I think, for Violet, it’s even more about self-abandonment. The Hursts treat her like she’s nothing, so she’s trying to make her outsides match her insides, trying to starve herself down to nothing. The goal really is death. Even if sallekhana, in Violet’s case, has an element of teenage angst.
I went through a period, after Smashed, when I was drawn to Eastern religions. I bought books by Pema Chodron. I spent a week at a Brighton Buddhist centre. The idea of forgiveness appealed--that you could just meditate, be your better self and rise above all the family dysfunction. As it turns out, that’s not a very effective way to deal with childhood trauma. In fact, neither is getting angry. You have to grieve a bit. And you have to give testimony. Maybe that’s with a therapist or maybe it’s in a notebook that you alone read. But, in the telling, a story of helplessness becomes one of resilience and strength.
How do you feel about Will’s diagnosis, do you think it is somehow right, or did his mother manage to create a problem where there was none? How much research did you have to do to portray him as a character?
I did a fair bit of research about mild epilepsy and Asperger’s. And I was struck by just how much of it seemed to mirror dissociation and symptoms of childhood trauma. I wanted to leave Will’s health issues in a kind of ambiguous place. I wanted there to be room for readers to draw their own conclusions. Is Will just conforming to the identity his mom has ascribed to him? Does Josephine revel in the attention and special treatment Will’s issues bring?
Asked to weigh in, I think I’d probably side with the therapist Douglas brings Will to see. I think he’s probably someone suffering from complex PTSD. It’s funny … months after I finished writing Mother Mother, I realised Will’s seizures were probably based on my own childhood anxiety attacks. I used to have similar fainting spells. Never at school. Never when I was with friends. Only when I was in a very confined space, one on one, with my mother.
Do you see Douglas as equally culpable as Josephine? Is absent parenting as bad, or even worse, than overbearing parenting?
I think absent parenting can indeed be as damaging as overbearing parenting. That said, I’ve always really wanted to like Douglas. I think he wants to save his family and do right by them. But at the same time, I think Douglas wasn’t shown much compassionate, engaged parenting when he was a kid so he has very little idea what a good-enough father looks like.
Are there any characters in literature or in real life which helped your portrayal of Josephine’s particular brand of evil?
I think Josephine is probably an amalgamation of all kinds of things: childhood experiences, people I’ve known, media, people I’ve seen. But I’ve always been drawn to books about the darker side of family life. Off the top of my head, Josephine probably has a touch of Adora Preaker in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and of the bloodthirsty and just plain bizarre mums in Angela Carter’s The Virago Book of Fairy Tales. She’s also a bit like Shakespeare’s Iago, in that she fills up her days with pointless deceits. Jo’s also like Lucifer in Dante’s Inferno, at least in the sense that Josephine’s “evil” is really just mindless suffering and a blind compulsion to act out a painful past.
Child Protection Services are portrayed as much more reliable than the police in Mother, Mother. Is this something you have experienced yourself? Are these portrayals from your own experience or from your research?
I did some research about Child Protection Services. I tried to speak to some people who had more experience and read as many stories as I could. I never came into contact with them during my own childhood, nor (thankfully!) in my experience as a parent. I think the Hursts’ situation is quite rare in this sense. I think most narcissistic families never come into contact with CPS because they’re so concerned with appearances. From the outside, a narcissistic family can look quite enviable, even though it’s a very different story within. Also, narcissistic families can be physically abusive, but they’re far more likely to be psychologically and emotionally abusive, which is harder to spot and nearly impossible to prove.
The three children’s reactions to Josephine’s upbringing are very different: suicide, healing, and imitation/damage. Do you see this as three different options that anyone could take, or do you believe that their nature affects how they react? Do you feel you could have fallen in either Rose or Will’s category of reaction had you been different?
What a fantastic question. I suppose the honest answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know why we all react to trauma differently. Probably birth order has something to do with it, as well as genetic factors. Personality disordered parents, especially borderline mothers, have a real psychological imperative to make one child the golden child and another a scapegoat – that way, they can project their own aspirations and grandiosity onto one child, and their undesirable “bad” qualities onto another. Over time, some kids like Will and Rose will take those pigeonholes on as their identity, whereas others like Violet will choose to reevaluate them. Violet also has a wider support network. She has other empathetic, maternal figures in her life. These women have taught her what love looks and feels like.
I shudder to think I might have ended up like Rose or Will, but that’s probably not too far off from the truth. In order for change to happen, you have to reach a point where your love outweighs your fear. I think that happened for me in my mid-twenties. I finally let myself imagine a future outside of my role in my family. I realised I really wanted to build a healthy family of my own, and in order to do that, I had to be willing to address the past. You can’t change how you relate to trauma if you can’t bring yourself to look squarely at it.
Why did you decide to move from non-fiction to fiction? Is the process very different?
Writing fiction was kind of a relief. Back when I was writing memoir, I always felt a little put out by the need to come up for air. When I’m writing, I find it really easy to dissociate, to just dive in and let the story swallow me up. But memoir requires constant surfacing. You’re forced to examine your memories in the light of the present moment. You dive down for details; come up for context. Sink down for action; swim back up for self-awareness and gratitude. It can give you the bends sometimes. Do it often enough, and it can make you feel kind of sick.
Writing Mother, Mother was more fun because I just got to grow gills and stay in the story. The Hursts didn’t need to be self-aware. In fact, the whole thing worked better when they weren’t.
Do you believe that mental illness can always be diagnosed? We see a lot of psychotherapists in Mother, Mother — do you put any stock in their findings?
As with anything, there are good therapists and bad ones. But I do believe in therapy, especially for people who have anxiety, post-traumatic stress, difficult childhoods. The process, when it works, is simply about bringing the painful past into mindfulness.
You don’t forget a bad childhood simply because you’re repressing it. On the contrary, it only makes you more likely to accidentally reenact the abuse. You pick a dangerous partner because they remind you of your punishing parent. You find it hard to be empathetic to others because you’ve been taught not to be compassionate to yourself.
A lot of childhood traumas have a wordless quality. You keep them to yourself, and they loom huge in your consciousness. But once you talk about them, give them language, you can begin to change the way you relate to them, and that in tur
n, changes the way you relate to others.
Edie says that “Having a baby doesn’t make you a mother any more than buying a piano makes you fucking Beethoven.” As a mother, do you feel that is true?
Well, I think that statement is probably tinged with Edie’s anger. But in the case of personality disordered parents, I think that’s true.
I’ll never forget an experience I had in a yard store here in upstate New York a few years ago. I was inside, browsing with a friend, when one of the sheep farmers came in rubber overalls and announced her sad morning. Two of the newborn lambs had died, she said. They’d frozen to death because the ewes hadn’t brought them inside to the warmth of the barn. And I realized, wow, this is a regular occurrence in nature: you get mothers who just don’t have the capacity to be nurturing. Maybe they feel love, but because of their own traumatic childhoods, they don’t know how to show it in healthy ways. Or maybe the very feelings of warmth and intimacy feel foreign and threatening to them; they can’t tolerate good feelings.
As a mother, I’ve got mom goggles. I’m utterly in love with my children, just the way they are, because I just can’t help myself. But there are also some very basic things I’ve had to learn. Things like how to teach boundaries. When you grow up in a family like the Hursts, where kids aren’t allowed personal boundaries (Jo still flosses Will’s teeth!), it’s hard to set them for yourself, let alone teach them to a four-year-old. To show that it’s okay to hide a precious toy away before a play date. To let her know that she doesn’t have to accept another kid putting her in a time out.
Fortunately, I have a lot of warm, maternal figures in my life I can call on for advice and support: neighbors, my wonderful aunt, my kind mother-in-law, my therapist, even some men. Some men, like my uncle, are the most “maternal” figures I know!
Will seems to be repeating the cycle of abuse that led Josephine to be abusive—do you believe there is any real hope of breaking the cycle? Is Violet’s philosophy of living for herself the only way? Can Will and Douglas ever recover? If not, why?
I think there’s hope they might all break the cycle.
It’s still very early in Will’s life. And I think there’s a good chance that his love will outweigh his fear of Josephine down the road. Maybe he’ll find a patient mentor in school. Or maybe he’ll meet someone special and want to work on himself in order to experience a healthy, romantic relationship. It won’t be easy going, but think he can still change. He just needs a safe person in his life. Someone who can widen his perspective and help him get in touch with his feelings of violation and grief.
I don’t know that Violet’s philosophy is the only way. But I do think she’s right to cut her loses at the moment — to focus on her own healing rather than trying to force a healthier dynamic on a family that isn’t ready for it.
I think there’s hope for Douglas too, but I think he needs to come to terms with his escapism first. He might not be using alcohol to numb out anymore, but he still tends to escape into fantasy, diversions or other people. That last one is the frightening one. I worry Douglas might take up with someone just as domineering as Josephine in the near future, all because he’s too scared to trust and rely on himself.
Which character did you sympathise with most?
What are the key themes of the novel?
Who or what does Koren Zalickas use to convey them?
Is Douglas as culpable as Josephine? Or is he another victim?
What is the role of the spouse in this kind of emotionally abusive situation?
Discuss Josephine’s relationship with her children.
How is it different for each of the children?
How do you think a woman like Josephine is created?
Do you think she loves her children?
How significant are the words Will learns and keeps in his journal?
Would having a baby have changed Rose, or would she have continued the cycle of abuse?
Do you think Violet made the right choice at the end of the novel?
Would you have done the same thing?
Why does Will not realise the true nature of his mother, when the whole world has?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As Violet would say, I must have been an exceptionally good person in a past life to know such inspiring women in this one.
Thank you, first and foremost, to my editor Alexis Washam for being my patient teacher and my sister in darkness. I’ve never loved writing more than I have with your contagious energy and warm, incisive guidance on the other end of the line. Also, my husband’s pet name for me is “Spoiler Alert,” so without you, this would have been a far less suspenseful book. Hopefully, all that clue-slashing hasn’t left you carpal tunneled.
Thank you to my agent Amanda Urban for reading and rereading and re-re-re-reading, always with trademark frankness and kindness.
Thank you Josie Freedman, also at ICM, for loving Will as much as I do. What’s more, at the exact second I was doing my best Munch scream, you called with all the answers I could have possibly asked for.
Molly Stern, Crown Publisher, I can’t even begin to put ten years’ worth of gratitude into words. In the trippy Oz of my adult life, you’ve been my Glinda the Good. You sent me down this book’s path long ago (probably without realizing it), and I’m so thankful you gave me the opportunity to realize it.
Other jewels in the Crown: Sarah Bedingfield, Sarah Breivogel, Lauren Kuhn, Rachel Meier, Jessica Prudhomme, and Jay Sones.
Thank you to everyone in the Mother-Motherland: Martha Frankel and her perennially awesome Woodstock Writers’ Festival; Barbara Cole; Cassandra Mahoney, Robin Shornstein; Woodstock Day School; the Mid-Hudson Library System; and The Golden Notebook, the coolest bookstore in Woodstock.
Also, on the subject of booksellers, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Miwa Messer and Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Program, who have been my friends and cheerleaders ever since I was, well … a drunken cheerleader.
Thank you to Christie Lafranchi, Devon Banks, Corvette Hunt, Mary Karr, Joan and David Lehmann, and the great many Hamiltons (especially Carol, for always being there to talk female-noir with me and remind me, in British-fashion, to keep calm and type on).
Speaking of British allies, I owe a great deal of gratitude to Kim Young at HarperCollins UK for help in this book’s final inning.
Thank you, above all, to my husband, Eamon Hamilton, and my three children for being my anti-Hursts. You are family like I never knew it could be.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KOREN ZAILCKAS is an internationally bestselling writer and has contributed to The Guardian, U.S. News & World Report, Glamour, Jane, and Seventeen magazine. She currently lives with her family in the Catskill Mountains in New York.
By the same author
NON-FICTION
Smashed: Growing Up A Drunk Girl
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Copyright © Lili Anolik 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photograph © Nilufer Barin / Arcangel Images
Lili Anolik asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted
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Source ISBN: 9780007563340
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007563357
Version 2016-04-05
Dedication
To my brother, John
“I was terribly, terribly pretty. I looked like an angel but I was a fiend inside.”
–Lee Miller
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Two
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Three
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
The Grip Lit Collection Page 60