Ainslie Hogarth's Motherthing is a grim, disturbing novel of family drama and mental illness, yet a bizarrely funny glimpse into one woman's mind. In its opening pages, Abby, who narrates, and Ralph have recently moved in with Ralph's mother, Laura, hoping to nurse her through her depression. But instead, Laura takes her life, Abby purloins Laura's coveted opal ring and Ralph falls into despair. "Because even though he'd been strong when we'd moved in, strong enough to move in--equipped with resources he'd downloaded from a website called the Borderline Parent, and a swear-on-your-life promise from me that I could handle this temporary uprooting--being near her stirred rotten dangerous things inside him."
Abby, very much in the throes of dealing with her own mother's shortcomings and abuse, has identified Ralph as part mother, part god, the "Perfect Good" in her life and "the most genuinely good person in the entire world." "Ralph would make eggs too, not specially because I was there, but because a person has eggs for breakfast. And soon, I remember thinking, clutching fistfuls of duvet to steady my overwhelming joy, I would be a person too." In flashbacks to her childhood, she recalls a beloved couch she calls Couchy Motherthing, and constantly circles and ponders the ideal mother figure; she relies on a cookbook "for the mothers of good, happy, wholesome families, with lots of mouths to feed. And that's the kind of mother I am too, even if I'm not yet"--because Abby desperately wants to have a child of her own, to embody the kind of mother that neither she nor Ralph got to have. She works at a nursing home where she considers her favorite resident her "baby" and, simultaneously, the perfect mother she never had. This fantasy is disrupted by the appearance of the woman's real daughter, which might just push Abby over the edge. Because paired with her nurturing impulse, Abby secretly harbors intense rage, "murder so much more manageable right now than creating a whole entire family." Her love verges on violence.
Hogarth (The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated)) rocks readers via Abby's turmoil, her swings from devotion to fury, self-loathing to self-aggrandizement. Motherthing keeps readers as unstable as its narrator, struggling to manage the traumas and the waves of emotion. Abby copes with a focus on a few objects that she imbues with special significance: Laura's ring (symbol of rejection, as Laura judged her daughter-in-law "more of a Kay Jewelers type than a vintage-family-heirloom type"), Abby's cookbook and the recipes she hopes will save Ralph (an obsessed-over jellied salmon and an unusual iteration of Chicken à la King). The result of these roiling thoughts and images is a darkly comic, kaleidoscopic novel of unhealthy fixations, love, murder, the gifts and wounds that family can inflict and one woman's fight to save herself. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: Mothers and motherhood haunt this alarming, dark, weirdly funny novel of family ties and the power of just the right recipe to heal all wounds.