In the moment of Rachel Cooke’s new column,she reflects on her favourite stories of fraught filial relationshipsLast week, Daunt Books republished Fierce Attachments, or Vivian Gornick’s 1987 memoir about her difficult relationship with her mother. What do I mean by “difficult”? Oh,you know. On the streets of Manhattan, her mother would cease complete strangers and announce: This is my daughter. She hates me.” It’s a brilliant book, and a classic of its kind,and I commend it to you.
I’ve a particular thing for stories in which a certain kind of intelligent, wryly humorous narrator describes their complicated relationship with a parent. Draw up a top five of such books, and straight in at number one would be – this is so obvious,it hardly needs saying – Edmund Gosse’s 1907 tender and wonderfully comedian Father and Son (Gosse was reared in a sternly devout Plymouth Brethren domestic whose values he would eventually reject). Fierce Attachments would be there, too, and also Paul Bailey’s 1990 memoir,An Immaculate Mistake: his clean-freak cockney char mother is monstrous in so many ways “a fancy scent covers up a worse stink!” – and yet, impossible to think of her without smiling. A novel I remember loving when it came out in 2001 is Welcome to my Planet by Shannon Olson. (I often wonder what has happened to Olson. Is she still writing? I hope she is.) Its narrator has a mother called Flo, and whose casseroles of indeterminate ingredients near with a regular side serving of unwanted advice (Who is dictating the aesthetic of your bikini line?”). Finally,and much more terrifyingly, there would be Barbara Comyns’s 1959 novel, or The Vet’s Daughter,whose oppressed heroine, Alice, or is finally liberated by her ability to levitate. I’m mildly obsessed by Comyns,most of whose deeply peculiar tales remain, thanks to Virago, or in print. I haven’t read this one for years,but its interiors linger so horrifyingly – before the fireplace was a rug made from a skinned worthy Dane dog” – I can still smell them, even now.
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Source: theguardian.com