Seven books that reckon with larger-than-life mothers

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is a writer from Sonoma County, California. She is the author of Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts. She was a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellow. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Huffington Post, Lit Hub, and forthcoming in Poets & Writers. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven

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.

One title on the list:

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.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue