Emma Uriarte

Mommy Issues

On Violaine Huisman’s The Book of Mother

Violaine Huisman’s The Book of Mother, translated by Leslie Camhi, introduces readers to Catherine, otherwise known as Maman, through the eyes of her daughter. Memoir and fiction interweave to paint a larger-than-life portrait of a woman who is at once loving and negligent, revered and frightening, objectionable and endearing—in other words, she captures the kind of person that can wield enormous power over a young girl’s mind: her mother. In doing so, she explores the ultimate question, and my greatest fear: do we turn into our mothers? 

The novel begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the realization all children reach at one point or another—our parents are human, capable of error and failure and, worst of all, disappointing us. “Up to that point, I’d admired my mother blindly, rapturously. But now a shadow had fallen over her image.” From this point the novel expands outward, inward, backward, and forward through short, interconnected vignettes that lend a breathless and almost desperate pace to the prose. Huisman regularly switches from her narrator’s voice to that of Maman, often in the middle of a sentence, to evoke the harshness, and often arbitrariness, of Maman’s judgements in a way that is equally horrifying and funny (or perhaps my horror was more inwardly directed, at the fact that I found Maman’s judgements so humorous). 

Maman’s past hovers just as ominously as the narrator’s in an effort to trace how a person is formed. Huisman writes of the children’s hospital the family lived next to: “It towered over us like a ghost when we left our apartment house; she stumbled in its shadow. It was a sign of the inescapability of her past, both the past she had lived and the past she had invented. That she had chosen to live near the edifice of this past, just next door to it, was an indication of how much she needed to make visible, to make material, a cause, an origin story, for the disaster that was her life.” The same effort to create an origin story for one’s life might be said of the book as a whole. It not only creates an origin for Maman, but also for the narrator herself, who is so haunted by the specter of her mother that she is compelled to write a book about it. How better to talk about our own shortcomings and traumas than to chart a path back to their biological origin?

Huisman doesn’t hold back when portraying Maman’s less desirable attributes, including the overwhelming effect her mental illness has had on her daughters’ lives, and in fact makes an effort to trace them back to Maman’s own childhood—illustrating that the baggage our own mothers give to us, we later (and without meaning to, perhaps) pass it on to our daughters. “She had opened a hole in her daughter’s heart by giving birth to her, and had left it gaping.” It all circles back to mommy issues. This theme resonates with me, maybe because of my own experience being mothered by a woman struggling with mental illness (although Maman certainly takes the cake). Still, I think Huisman’s novel speaks to anyone with a mother-figure by exploring a mother’s power over her offspring, for better or worse. We all hope it will be for the better, maybe even—as is the case in this novel—when nearly all evidence points otherwise. Maybe it’s optimism, the naïve hope that we will not inflict the same traumas on our own offspring that our mothers inflicted upon us. The Book of Mother seems to point to a complexity of generational relationships: yes, our mothers have power over us, and yes, we carry parts of them in ourselves; but that does not define us completely. Maman is different from her mother, just as the narrator is different from Maman, even when we can see the psychological influence each woman had on the next. 

Huisman’s novel posits the mother-child relationship as not only one that is trauma-inducing, but one that is life-saving as well. Of one thing this book is abundantly clear: the emotions between a mother and her children are complicated and powerful. “That insane love, that almost intolerable passion for and from two brats who were annoying at almost every age; that boundless love that would outlast everything, transcend everything, forgive everything; the love that led her to call us (when we weren’t little shits, or bitches, or cunts) my adored darlings whom I love madly—that love kept her going as long as she could.” The love between Maman and her daughters is full of soaring highs and abysmal lows, and nonetheless it is life-giving, a reason for survival. 

The urgency of the prose, as well as the fact that this novel spans little more than 200 pages, makes it easy to breeze through The Book of Mother, caught up in the whirlwind that is growing up with (and later, as) poor, crazy, beautiful Maman. Although very briefly the prose ranges on melodramatic, or the tension dissipated by needless foreshadowing, I found myself immensely drawn to the desperate language, Maman’s voice that seemed to shout from the page, and the carefully-evoked mother-daughter relationships. 

In response to the question of whether we turn into our mothers, or maybe in addition to it, Huisman gives readers this: whatever their impressions on us, our mothers remain monoliths long after they’re gone.