In 1980, following an unhappy and traumatic childhood, Josephine leaves Ireland, determined never to return. Her new life in London is exciting but, however hard she tries, she discovers that it is impossible to leave the effects of the past behind. Seventeen years later, now married with two children, Clare and Thomas, she gets a phone call from her sister to let her know that their mother is dying and wants to see her. Reluctant as she is to return to Ireland and re-visit her past, she cannot ignore this request but approaches the visit with increasing feelings of dread. On the other hand, ten-year-old Clare is increasingly excited about the forthcoming summer holiday, when she will meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. Aware that her mother is often unhappy, she hopes that this trip will cheer her up and will, consequently, make life easier for everyone.
Set across two decades this story explores how the lives of a troubled, emotionally and physically abusive mother and her innocent ten-year-old daughter change forever following this fateful holiday, when long-kept family secrets are exposed in a dramatic and intensely disturbing way.
Told through the alternating voices of Josephine and Clare this is a dark and disturbing story about the ways in which abusive relationships are so often repeated from generation to generation. In an ideal world, Josephine’s experiences as a child should have ensured that she would treat her children with love and kindness. However, her own struggles with depression and her addiction to alcohol result in her interactions with them, her daughter in particular, being unpredictable, tainted by memories of her own experiences of abuse. In her attempts to protect Clare from life in general, and men in particular, she in fact teaches her to become almost fearful, thus passing on her own dysfunctional beliefs. Her frequent, negative comments about Clare’s physical appearance and her daughter’s completely normal enjoyment of food, felt extremely upsetting as it became clear that the child felt tormented by them and was already developing disturbing problems with her self-image. Josephine was capable of showing warmth and kindness but all too often was both physically and emotionally abusive and, the more depressed and anxious she became, the more unreasonable her behaviour became.
Although the focus of the story was on the mother/daughter relationship, the frequently toxic relationship between Josephine and her husband Michael, as well as the sibling relationship between Clare and Thomas, were also convincingly well developed. The fact that Michael was able to tolerate his wife’s unreasonable, unpredictable behaviour may in part have been due to the fact that “saving face” was important to both of them, but the result did at least provide some consistency for the children – at times it also felt like something of a minor miracle!
The author captured the two narrative voices in a powerful and convincing way throughout the story, maintaining each in a very distinctive way. Perhaps this was especially potent in the way in which she captured Clare’s innocent, but perceptive, musings about the reasons behind her mother’s unpredictable moods; her relationship with her younger brother (beautifully captured), which alternated between at times wanting to protect him from their mother’s behaviour, intense irritation with his “childish” behaviour and her own obsession with sweets and playing childhood games. It was interesting that whilst Clare’s narrative demonstrated that she often tried to see things from her mother’s perspective, Josephine’s showed that she was far too engaged in her own concerns to take much time to think about the effects of her behaviour on the family.
As a result of the way in which the author so vividly explored the ongoing effects of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, the struggle with feelings of guilt and shame, the distress of not being listened to and heard, mental illness and the enduring power of secrets in families, this was not an easy book to read. However, as I became immersed in this moving and disturbing story, there was never a moment when I felt anything other than totally engaged with the authenticity of the characters’ struggles as they tried to make sense of what felt like a very brutal world.
My thanks to Readers First and Allen and Unwin for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.