The symbolic mother is impossible to get away from. Across cultures and throughout history, in folklore, film, and literature, mothers have been given a symbolic weight that serves as an anchor within both the narrative and the family she created. They are portrayed as nurturers: warm and tender, stern and noble, fiercely protective. Their absence creates a vacuum, a vulnerable opening for evil step-mothers, paranoid governesses, bad influences, or vice.
This abstract, larger-than-life mother has the ability to haunt all of us. While writing my debut memoir, Holding, I discovered her role in my own narrative. As an anxious child and a risk-averse teen, I was not the type to get wrapped up in intravenous drug use. And yet. What I’d been after in all of those dopamine blasts, in that dreamy fog of opiates, was not thrills but solace. I was seeking my mother, the comfort and safety she provided when I was an infant, before I was aware of my separateness from her, of the pressing demands of society.
In my book, mother is both flesh-and-blood woman and the figurehead of my anxieties: she is a void, an enigma, a mirror. Sometimes she is not my mother at all but someone or something else entirely—a less-crucial stand-in for the relationship I both desired and denied, one I could test the limits of. Or keep in my pocket, put in my body.
The following reading list is comprised of both fiction and nonfiction books that engage with the symbolic mother. These works push her away and pull her in, stare into her harsh reflections. They acknowledge the gifts she bears as well as the scars she’s left. They attempt to scale her outsize dimensions, to remember, in the end, that she is human.
Mother as Echo
The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole
Bankole’s debut novel follows three generations of women as they navigate trauma, tradition, independence, and desire. Beginning in Nigeria, Esther makes the first passage, leaving her husband despite cultural taboo and social ostracization, to start anew in her own flat with her daughter, Amina. Though Esther herself is headstrong and individualistic, she is unsettled to notice those same attributes in her daughter. After Amina moves to the United States, Esther writes in a letter to her: “I wanted you to be like me, yet walk a separate path. I prayed to see you become who I had hoped to be.”
In New Orleans, two pivotal events—the birth of Amina’s daughter Laila and the landfall of Hurricane Katrina—bring about tragedy and hope, forgiveness and regret, reunion and loss. The Edge of Water is a poignant portrayal of lineal ongoingness, the infinite echoing that’s passed from mother to daughter.
Mother as Paradox
Love is a Burning Thing by Nina St. Pierre
In her searing debut memoir, St. Pierre attempts to grasp the slippery complexities of her mother, a woman whose adult life was bookended by self-set fires—first to her body and then to her home. Because her mother’s undiagnosed schizophrenia was camouflaged in the esoteric language and practices of New Ageism, St. Pierre could never quite see it for what it was. Her mother’s delusions “formed the boundaries of [her] own imagination.”
Through deep examinations of mental illness, spirituality, poverty, and art, St. Pierre reconciles the woman who both protected her and potentially exposed her to danger, who kept their lives adrift and ungrounded as a means of rebirth, not destruction.
Mother as Ghost
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt
British writer Susie Boyt’s first American offering is a study of quiet grief, gentle affection, and steady, watchful hope. In gorgeous, somehow autumnal prose, Boyt tells the story of three generations of women. Ruth’s adult daughter, Eleanor, is a semi-estranged heroin addict whose infant daughter, Lily, is not only exposed to the drug and its hazards at home, but was in the womb as well—spending her first weeks in the neonatal unit on a morphine infusion. To keep her granddaughter safe, Ruth assumes custody of Lily and raises her from the preternaturally wise child she is to the sensible, mature, and caring teenager she becomes.
Throughout the novel, Eleanor rebuffs Ruth’s attempts at family. She flakes out, pulls away, recoils at any hint of intimacy. Ruth chastises her own “forced mildness” around her seldom-seen daughter, which she suspects may be the reason for Eleanor’s feral-cat temperament. “I wished she would hand me a script, a set of instructions, what to say what to do what to feel…. Sometimes I thought the more Eleanor evaded and erased me the more I needed her.” For Lily, her mother’s absence—or worse, avoidance—eventually surfaces as tidy, self-aware rage that she allows herself to feel. It is precisely Eleanor’s occasional resurfacing, her near proximity, that are so difficult for both Lily and Ruth. Not a complete severance, Eleanor haunts the edges of her mother’s and daughter’s lives, reminding them that they are not worth her time or effort. Yet despite the bleak acceptance of this, the story is limned in the soft glow of resilience and beauty.
Mother as Tide
At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid
The works in Kincaid’s slim 1983 collection resist definition. They’ve been described as short stories, prose poems, and essays, but transcend these limiting taxonomies, becoming, instead, words and ideas that stick in our minds long past reading them. I first read “Girl,” the book’s opening piece, in high school. I’ve never let go of its rhythms, its fully-lived advice, its refrain about resisting “the slut you are so bent on becoming’’—both an accusation and admission, the blurring of mother and daughter.
“My Mother” is made up of several vignettes, all of them surreal and vivid, tracing the evolution of a mother-daughter relationship. They illustrate the necessary and normal push and pull between mother and daughter: instruction and rebellion, anger and adoration, longing and rejecting, impressing and repulsing. In the penultimate vignette, the daughter comes to understand what they are to one another. “We eat from the same bowl, drink from the same cup; when we sleep, our heads rest on the same pillow. We merge and separate, merge and separate.”
Mother as Behemoth
Everything/Nothing/Someone by Alice Carrière
In her memoir, Carrière takes the reader through a childhood of disorder and neglect amongst the celebrities and freewheeling bohemians of New York City’s art scene. Her mother, Jennifer Bartlett, was a larger-than-life visual artist, not only in her success or by the vast scale of her paintings, but in her singular personality. “She brought her own atmosphere with her wherever she went,” Carrière recalls, “—a cloud of perfume, a cloud of smoke, a cloud of utter fucklessness…. She was the center of attention all the time, but the way she tugged on the spotlight seemed protective, as if she were trying to conceal herself with the glare.”
This hiding Bartlett did—behind her star power, her artistic genius, her unconventionality and over-the-top stories—kept Carrière astray in her own home, unprotected and detached from any intimacy. This detachment found its way into her mind: She suffered from dissociative disorder in her teens, which was further fueled by overmedication, self-obsession, and an inappropriate relationship with her laissez-faire father. It isn’t until Bartlett receives a cancer diagnosis that her godlike enormity comes into correct focus, shrinking to the dimensions of a human, a mother that now needs her daughter to care for her. Though she finds her mother’s change in demeanor infuriating and alien, it is also where she locates a tenderness she theretofore had no access to.
Mother as Stranger
What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About edited by Michele Filgate
Defamiliarization in art (or ostranenie) is the idea that by making something strange, the viewer or reader will regard it anew and therefore understand it more completely. In this robust anthology, the mother is gazed at with impartial, sometimes clinical curiosity. Removed from her taken-for-granted role in the essayist’s life, she is made strange.
This book is chockablock with literary heavyweights, featuring essays like Carmen Maria Machado’s “Mother Tongue,” in which Machado grapples with the shame she feels around her unrelenting mother, whom she describes as an “immovable, illogical object”, and Alexander Chee’s “Xanadu”, throughout which his mother seems off to the side until her curious near-omission ultimately reveals itself as the center, the eye of a storm created by tragedy, abuse, and guilt. A place where Chee keeps her safe.
Mother as Secret
Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker
Clove, the central character in Bieker’s gripping novel, has a gorgeous, Instagram-worthy life, one she meticulously constructed from lies and facades. She is a wife to a supportive husband, a mother of two cuties, and a minor social-media momfluencer whose trad-lite, woo-ish aesthetic earned her almost 40k followers—but the people who orbit her life know nothing about her at all.
Though Clove’s life has been built around countless secrets (her name is not even Clove) the biggest secret—the mother of all secrets—is that of her mother, who is carrying out a life sentence for pushing her violent husband—Clove’s father—off a high-rise lanai. Now, Clove’s mother has a chance for retrial and ultimately, freedom, but only if Clove is willing to testify on her behalf, an act that would unravel Clove’s entire life. Like Godshot, Bieker’s 2020 novel about a religious cult and an estranged mother, Madwoman is populated with mentors and guardians who stand in the void the mother has left. There’s Christine, the feminist neighbor who hatches Clove’s escape plan; Velvet, the straight-talking matron who runs a de facto boarding house for wayward girls; and Jane, the luminous woman Clove fortuitously meets in a roadside fender bender. Though this book has the movements of a thriller, complete with a satisfying twist, its essence lies in its allegorical rendering of domestic abuse and the lengths its victims will go to for survival—the backstories fabricated, the realities curated, and the men shoved off balconies.
