NYou will never be the daughter that your mother would have liked. And sooner or later you understand it. Not with anger. Nor with resentment. But with that lucidity that only comes with maturity. It is a breaking point, yes. But it’s not an end. Indeed: it’s a beginning. Your. With The club of bad daughtersVanessa Montfort – former author of the bestseller Women who buy flowers – illuminates that precise moment in which an adult daughter stops living to adhere to the image that the mother had sewn about her.
A crossing that also live the protagonists of the novelwhen – returning to Madrid, in the neighborhood of their childhood – they find themselves breathing inside a bond that still weighs, that stings, who asks for answers. But something, this time, cracks. In that thin crack, for the first time, they stop living the role of the “good”, obedient, complacent daughters.
From that radical gesture the courage to rewrite the maternal bond is born: not to recover it, but to transform it into something new. From wound to space. From weight to possibilities.
The “bad daughters” of Vanessa Montfort
Vanessa Montfort is a Spanish writer and playwright. His women who buy flowers was international success. © Enrique Cidoncha
Montfort, why the “bad daughters”?
The title is deliberately ironic. Bad daughters is the label that many women end up sewing on, often in silence, when they stop adhere – or to want to join – to the model that their mothers had imagined for them. The protagonists of the novel are not bad. But they feel such just when they begin to choose themselves, to be autonomous, to think with one’s own head. Not because they hurt or destroy, but because they stop obeying.
And it is at that moment that they collide with a tremendous sense of guilt …
In a culture that rewards the helpful, accommodating, silent daughters, choosing itself is a gesture that looks like a transgression. And like any transgression, he leaves a shadow. An internal voice that says: you are not enough. Not enough enough. Not quite grateful. Not enough “right”. In everyone’s eyes: of society, partner and children, when they are there. But, more than any other, in the eyes of the mother.
The club of the bad daughters of Vanessa Montfort, Feltrinelli432 pages, 20 €
The feeling of inadequacy towards the mother is an ancient, transversal wound, yet still widely silent.
Maternal love can be a trap. There are mothers who cancel themselves out of love, transmitting the idea that loving means disappearing. Others who manipulate in a subtle way, or who love so much intensity as to become suffocating. The wound of the daughters remains hidden. Buried under layers of silence, of duties, of that “becomes like this” handed down as a commandment. Then, sometimes, as happens to the protagonists, something happens. A crack. And that’s where the need to disobey is born. To disappoint, if needed.
What happens then?
Something moves inside. The daughters begin to look at the mother with new eyes. And in that different look, more lucid and together more human, it turns out that the thread that unites them is not a noose. It’s a knot, yes. But also a bond. Imperfect, contradictory, at times suffocating. It should not be cut, but listened to. Reread. Renymbotiato. Transformed. Not to please. But to be reborn. To recognize themselves as whole beings. Women between women. Fragile, complex, lives.
Do the accounts with the mother never close?
Until time allows it, I believe that the real goal is not to close, but transform the bond. Give a new meaning to those suspended wounds, reopen those interrupted conversations that still burn under the skin like discovered nerves. Finding the courage to look in the face of those emotional ghosts that condition every gesture, every thought.
She writes: “Being daughters is not a condemnation, but a beginning”. In what sense?
The protagonists carry the weight of an emotional legacy made of suffocating expectations on their shoulders, but they do not remain motionless within that model. Singing from the imposed roles, abandoning the script written by others, is not a tear, it is a metamorphosis.
In the novel one behaves like his mother’s mother; Another felt abandoned by his; Another yet has never felt said to be a source of pride. A truce ever arrives?
The armistice, if it arrives, is more than formal emotional. It is a silent point where something is attached, without clamor. The emotional maturity begins when we stop seeing “the mother” as an absolute role, and we begin to recognize her for what it is: not a divinity, but a woman. With its history. His wounds. His fears. And perhaps, if we cannot forgive her, we can at least learn not to judge it anymore. And above all, not to judge ourselves. Not to call us more bad.
Is there anything autobiographical in his novel?
I am 50 years old, and the umbilical cord, in my case, I had to cut it into acceptance. Still, this book is not mine alone. It is a chorus of voices. The idea began to sprout after reading T He Mom Factor (the mother factor) by Henry Cloud and John Townsend. That book helped me to give a name to deep and unresolved dynamics, to recognize emotional patterns that I had warned, but never fully understood. It was like opening a crack: from there reflections, memories, and then the stories of many other women passed. Women who, like me, had for years sought a balance between love and identity, between bond and freedom. From that moment, I understood that this novel could become a space of recognition. A place where you don’t feel more sun.
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