TOh, the mothers. What a thorny topic. We are Italian, who knows it better than us? Whether we like it or not, the whole world identifies us with a variable triad whose first two elements are always mother and pizza, only one of which is completely positive. It is therefore obvious that when a fictional, literary, cinematographic or television product arrives, focusing on a maternal figure, our antennas immediately go up. We feel it is ours, it immediately seems made especially for us. But naturally we are not the only ones in the world for whom the orbits of existential frustrations, traumas and all those matters that make psychoanalysts happy are almost always mammocentric. THEThe mother drama unites us, across eras and cultures. And in fact the novel we are about to talk about, which has become a sensational editorial case thanks to word of mouth alone, is about to be translated into 34 other countries in addition to Italy. It is clear that the matter affects us. Everyone. Bad mom is an incredibly sensitive topic.
An evil stepmother is fine, an evil mother is taboo
Generations raised on Disney films know very well that the protagonist’s adventures always begin in the family, but the tormentor is never her biological mother: a bad stepmother is fine, a bad mother is taboo. The mother, the real one, is good, dead, idealized. Even a mediocre mother was a taboo for a very long time, and until the day before yesterday: those who lived through the nineties will remember the case, in my opinion extreme, of the series The nannywhose adaptation transformed the protagonist’s family into Italian (Jewish in the original version), and therefore also transformed the protagonist’s mother into an unlikely Aunt Assunta, perhaps because for us it was easier to make fun of the defects of an aunt than those of a mother. (I say “extreme case” because after all there already existed a thriving genre of comedy that had legitimized satire on mothers: one could have dared.)
But in any case the key word is “comedy”: problematic mothers were almost always talked about only in light, conciliatory terms, projected towards an ending of forgiveness and good feelings.
Bad mothers destabilize us
The testimonies of the daughters of old Hollywood stars shock us: discovering that women deified on the screen were capable in real life of abandoning or mistreating their little girls arouses horror and morbid curiosity in us, like the stories of serial killers. It is also one of the rare films that I remember that depicted an anguished mother-daughter relationship (The voice of lovethe choice of the Italian title is also interesting, so reassuring, while the original title was One True Thing“a true thing,” and the novel on which it was based An exemplary daughter) was careful to make clear right from the start the justifications for the character of the mother, played by Meryl Streep.
A scene from the film The voice of loveoriginal title One True Thing.
If the daughter is happy about her mother’s death. The novel “Love, Mom,” by Iliana Xander
This is why a novel that starts, without preambles, without bearings, with a daughter happy about the death of her mother can only grab us by the collar and intrigue us like few others. Mackenzie Casper is a little girl of about twenty years old and weighs about fifty kilos, yet she opens the novel with a uppercut (literally) that would bring down a heavyweight: «I have never hurt anyone. Right now, though, I would like to punch the face staring back at me from the front page of a national newspaper. A photograph of her… the beautiful face of a monster.”
“Love, Mom” by Iliana Xander, Longanesi384 pages, €20
And shortly after: «He asked for it. He deserved to die. I just wish it had happened sooner». Surely this blatant hatred can be explained by something striking, our little inner voice immediately tells us. A daughter cannot come to hate her mother so much if not because of gross abuse. Has she been beaten, segregated, forced into prostitution, has she suffered the legendary Münchhausen Syndrome by proxy?
The dark side of the mother daughter relationship
And instead – and, believe me, what I’m about to say is not a spoiler, for the simple reason that there is so much to discover in this book that even if I gave you double the information it still wouldn’t be a spoiler – little by little a much more subtle network of bullying is revealed to us, made up of distances, reticence, refusals, expressions of aversion which end up putting ice in the veins more than a single sensational event.
An abyss we know
Why they are things that, in one way or another, we can all relate to. It is an abyss into which we know that we too have, at least a little, at least sometimes, peeked into it, in the small part of our family routines. A steep but realistic slope, made of unsatisfied desire for recognition, hunger for affection, accumulated resentments. We look down and see a darkness into which we know it is not so unlikely to fall.
Even if, then, there is the sensational event – more than one, to be honest. But here, yes, it’s good for me to stop. I’ll just tell you how the story starts: when Mackenzie begins to receive letters that seem to come from her mother who has just died, to reveal (but why? And why only now?) a surprising past, Mac understands that she cannot move forward in a world in which her mother no longer torments her, without first going back a little and having the courage to get to know better the woman he always wanted to escape from.