This week’s stash of library ebooks make me glad that my mom is nice, loving, and supportive in a totally normal way. Because the moms in here are not.
Screenshot of the library’s ebook copy
The Only Girl in the World, by Maude Julien (library ebook): This memoir is about a girl who grew up with a strict training regimen dictated by her father and executed by her mother so that she would grow up as a sort of female ubermench. Every second of of her days were accounted for with farm chores designed to make her strong, homeschooling to make her brilliant, and punishing surprise survivalist tests that were supposed to make her fearless.
Of course, all of this just made her determined to escape as soon as she could, and after contemplating running away as a young teen, she finally did, and grew up to be a famous psychologist. Who never talked to either of her parents again.
No sort of summary or review can convey the full visceral feel of reading through Julien’s childhood. She writes with plain clarity that leaves her parents’ cruelties to speak — shout, really — for themselves. This extends to her childhood emotions, too, and I think part of that comes from her therapist training. Her no-frills prose makes you feel like you’re right there beside her in the dark, locked basement as her father makes her sit for hours to get rid of her fear of rats, or next to her mother on their feet for hours wading through the guts of the lamb that she had to calm right before the butcher slaughtered it so it would taste good. It leads your brain to its own emotional response, which kicks up so much more empathy than if every piece of terror was underlined three times with florid description.
I had a hard time reading the bits about animals and how they were treated on their farm. Julien uses these as examples of how thought out her parents’ cruelties became, and how she first started subverting them to help the pets who were her only friends.
The other part that made me have to take breaks wasn’t as difficult to get through emotionally but showed the twisted way her existence had been planned to complete her father’s life. He was a friend of her mother’s parents, and when her mother was six, her father started raising her mother to be the mother of his perfect child until she was of age to marry. I really hope it doesn’t surprise you at how gross and predatory that is to read about, even though his version of the perfect wife was much more academically robust and centered around intelligence rather than housewifery. (Although he still expected her to do all that, too.)
I can’t say I enjoyed this book per se. It was just too brutal. The writing is good, which just makes everything she went through all the more terrifying, and I appreciate that she brought this style to what is a basic triumph over adversary narrative.
Although I feel like a dick saying that since it actually happened and is not just another YA setup for a Chosen One.
Screenshot of the library’s ebook copy
Woman No. 17, by Edan Lepucki (library ebook): I wanted to like this book completely. I did. It started out an original enough example of a suburban thriller.
It’s about a wealthy woman in a suburb of LA who hires a young live-in nanny for the toddler of her and her husband as their marriage starts to crumple. She also has an eighteen-year-old son by another man she tried to live with but he ran away soon after she gave birth. The teenage son doesn’t talk. He communicates via text, notes, etc., and there’s no physical reason for him to stay silent, but he does. The mom senses their close bond is starting to fray as he grows up.
Enter the nanny. She’s actually a former art student who is trying to get her creativity back after breaking up with what seems like an insufferable dude who “only lived for his art.” Barf. Look, I get you have to be dedicated, like pretty much unhealthily so to push creative stuff out into the world, but make sure you have at least one, like, way to take a break. Go play video games or something.* (*Unrelated to the solid two weeks I lost to Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp on my phone. Ahem.)
Anyway. The nanny sees that the mother is the sister in law of a famous photographer; the mom posed in the photographer’s series of candid portraits of women in their environments. So the nanny wants in. For art. Or something.
And this is where the book loses me. The nanny decides to pretend to be like her own mother, who, unlike herself, is a big lush who is mostly cheerful and sociable and selfish and apparently dresses dumpier than her daughter.
Why? Who is this performance for? No one at the new household knows diddlyfarts about what the nanny’s mom is like. She doesn’t even know why she’s doing it, except for some half-assed idea she comes up with to get random people to send her photos of their moms, and she’d recreate them, and then paint the recreation photos. Okay? And the only thing that happens is she’s almost fired for drinking too much several times, and in the chapters from the mom’s point of view, she’s a bit catty once or twice about how bad the girl’s clothes look on her.
And speaking of the mom’s side, she secretly joins Twitter to blast out the most inane mom jokes I’ve ever read. It’s treated as this like most subversive thing possible, even though the mom hooks back up with her old boyfriend as she and her husband are actively trying to reconcile and the nanny ends up seducing the 18-year-old.
Yeah. There’s that.
He’s treated as super independent, totally normal, has already lost his virginity a year or two previously to his (high school-aged) girlfriend at the time. But their chemistry, at least as seen from the nanny’s point of view, is forced. It seems more like the nanny is channeling her drunk mom to sleep with him, which is even more creepy, and like is that why she’s pretending to be someone else? It’s so empty of motivation and there is no real thought process, no decision whatsoever coming from an organic emotion or reaction.
Long story short, the mom finds out about everything, is furious; the teenager finds his real dad, connects; the nanny is kicked back to her parents, who have the most honest-feeling reaction, basically: “I don’t understand what you’re trying to do.”
The only bit that redeems its mechanics is that the nanny’s first solo art show is centered around all the dick pics she got when she asked for photos from strangers online. THAT is a post-modern commentary on internet culture that I’d go see (also because you know the avant garde have the strongest cheese cubes).