Wednesday, June 23, 2021

A Tale of Two Women--guest post by Jeannette de Beauvoir.

RHYS: Frist let me say that if my name was Jeannette de Beauvoir I'd think I'd died and gone to heaven. Doesn't she sound like a heroine from a medieval chanson? Who could be rude to someone with such a glorious name? And if I looked like Jeannette I'd be quite happy too. And her writing isn't too shabby either, with New York Times bestsellers.... so Jeannette, I'm really glad to have you as our guest today with such a meaningful and poignant post.


JEANNETTE: 

I recently passed a storefront and caught sight of my unscripted reflection—I’m more prepared, somehow, when I look in the mirror—and was surprised and somewhat aghast to see my mother’s face there. It’s a truism that women come to resemble their mothers, but this, I thought, was taking that way too literally. 

I’ve actually and oh-so-unintentionally come to look a lot like her. 

I’m now two years older than my mother was when she died (far too young, thanks to Philip Morris International), and it feels in some ways like I’m living in unexplored territory. While she and I made radically different choices and pursued nearly opposite directions for our lives, as long as I was younger than her, I felt a certain measure of safety. She’d been forty-six before me. She’d been fifty-eight before me.

Now she’s dead before me.

So I’ve been thinking about her, and our relationship failures and successes. But not just about her; about the theme in general. Mothers and daughters have a strange connection that’s been explored—in politics, in fiction, in nonfiction, in research—nearly ad infinitum; yet as an author, the connection’s a deep well I’ve come back to again and again, and it’s never failed me. 

The mother-daughter bond is often problematic. Our first relationship is with our mother, and what we learn from her becomes fiercely entangled with our sense of self. Our childhoods have a strong hold on us, and so a lot of fiction explores the possibility of—or failure to—rise above dysfunctional families of origin. I think all women have some sort of mother/daughter issue: friction is, you might say, part of the job description for both parties. 

Readers enjoy subplots in their stories, and mystery readers in particular attach to recurring characters and are always curious about the lives and relationships of those characters—in addition, of course, to the solving of the central crime or crimes in the story. We all enjoyed the development of Lord Peter’s love affair with Harriet Vane; Alan and Marta’s easy friendship in The Daughter of Time; the intricacies of Jane and Madeleine and Celeste’s interactions in Big Little Lies.

Or sometimes it’s those connections that are central to the plot. Agatha Christie and G.K Chesterton pioneered looking at emotions and relationships as being intrinsic to crime-solving. 

And what more intense, more fraught, more complex relationship is there to explore than that of a mother and daughter? It’s complicated, it’s scratchy, it’s enduring, and it’s interesting. I don’t think anyone in mystery writing does it better than Phil Rickman, author of the Merrily Watkins series. As the years pass, Merrily’s relationship with her daughter Jane shifts, morphs, develops, backslides… it’s always interesting, it’s often entertaining, and it makes the books rich and layered and relatable. Sometimes Jane’s presence is intrinsic to the mystery; sometimes she drifts in and out of a given story; but she’s one of those characters you feel you’ve really gotten to know, even if half the time you want to tell her to just cut it out.




In my current series, my protagonist Sydney has a mother who calls at inconvenient times, chatters incessantly about her friends’ daughters’ weddings, and refuses to acknowledge Sydney’s Muslim boyfriend. Unlike other authors, though, I didn’t set out to explore the mother/daughter bond; this mother was, you might say, there out of convenience. 

The first book in the series situated Sydney in an idyllic setting with a near-perfect life (well, except for the body in the pool, but you can’t have everything, right?). I needed to inject some conflict into her world, but not so much that it carried the story; her mother was the perfect foil. As the series has developed, so has Sydney’s “Ma,” and in the most recent book, Dead in the Water, we not only learn some of the reasons for the conflict between the two women but also see them coming to a fragile understanding of each other.

Of course, that’s pretty tame. Compare it to Stephen King’s Carrie—now there’s a relationship that’s gone horribly wrong!—or V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic, and Sydney’s mom is small potatoes. But whether they’re saints or monsters, whether we emulate them or rebel against them, our mothers are a defining influence in who we become. The weight of parental expectations, the need to separate and simultaneously get closer, the fierce love and fierce hatred, the rivalry, the missing mothers, the lost daughters… there is always such an entanglement of love and grief and joy and disappointment that we can’t look away. No matter who is writing, and no matter what the relationship, the interaction between mothers and daughters is evergreen. 

And I’m pretty sure novelists will still be exploring it a century from now.

RHYS: So Reds, who wants to chime in on mother/daughter relationships? Fraught? Wonderful?

My own was rather remote until I grew up. Then we became great friends.



44 comments:

  1. This is so insightful, Jeannette . . . mother/daughter relationships always seem so riveting . . . . I think it will be interesting to discover some of the background in Sydney’s relationship with her mom. Congratulations on your newest book . . . .

    Mother/daughter relationships? Unique and special . . . .

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    1. I think they *do* feel riveting, especially to women, no matter how "normal" they might seem. And "blaming the mother" has been a popular way of explaining away everything from kids with guns to marrying a prince. The trope is old but apparently continues to have life. (Sydney's mom, after this "revelatory book," will have something of a different role in her life going forward. It will be a relief for both of them, I think!)

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  2. My mom and I were best friends through my adult life. Of course, I gave her lots of grief and gray hairs while in my teen years. And during her final few years, the tables turned and I took on the parental half of the equation, which gave ME lots of gray hairs.

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    1. It's such an interesting relationship, when the weight of responsibility for the other shifts, sometimes more than once. I don't think there's anything else, really, like it. I do think some conflict—and "gray hairs"—is inevitable!

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  3. Congratulations, Jeannette, on the new book! I have also grown to resemble my mother, both in face and midsection. My relationship with her was fraught for a few years, during a time when she was deeply unhappy and I was "living in sin" - unmarried with a boyfriend. When I later became a mother, I think she felt I was finally acceptable in a way I hadn't been before.

    She was a wonderful grandmother to my sons. As my own parenting went along, I realized how much I appreciated the way she raised my siblings and me. I've loved exploring the mother-daughter relationship in my own books, although none is very fraught - yet.

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  4. Fraught could come, Edith! And even those relationships that aren't clearly difficult can be... tricky. Conflict is built in when the daughter as an adolescent wants/needs to separate and the other wants/needs to protect her. It's stitched into the fabric of the relationship, isn't it, no matter what either party does or doesn't do?

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  5. Welcome Jeannette, what a great topic! You are absolutely right about adolescence bringing built-in conflict! In my first two series, mothers were a steady source of material. In the Key West books, Hayley Snow and her mother have finally settled into a solid friendship. It's a relief for all of us! My mother died young, so I'm getting to explore with my characters what I couldn't finish with her.

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  6. Hi, Lucy... I wonder if that's what we do with all our characters, explore something that didn't happen (or did happen, but not to our satisfaction) in our own lives. Fiction, after all, allows us to live out multiples lives every time we pick up a book!

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  7. I love to explore relationships in books. My favorite mother in all of the series I read is Duncan Kincaid's mom in Deb's series. She is the mother I want to have. On the other hand, there is Georgie's mom in Rhys's Her Royal Spyness series. I just love it when she is a central character in those stories. Her unapologetic self absorption, although over the top, reminds me of...maybe I shouldn't say who.

    My mother died 3 weeks before her 47th birthday. I was 18. Although I know she loved me a lot, what I remember is the constant criticism and frustration as she tried to make me change. She never took my side in any instance when having someone in your corner would count. Her question was always, "What did you do to make that happen?"

    My father married again and my step mother was a totally different person and our relationship took years to smooth out. Sometimes a woman can become the person she wants to be anyway.

    Therapy helped.

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    1. It's a truism—but still true!—that we can learn a lot about ourselves through reading fiction.

      There are so many situations and histories that influence the way our mothers treated us—and the way we treat our daughters. My brilliant stepdaughter earned a degree in marine biology but lives in Arizona and works for her fiancĂ©'s family company. I caught myself doing the I-wish-she'd-use-her-degree thought and realized two things: I made some pretty awful life decisions in *my* twenties and have survive... and she's actually *happy*, something I certainly hadn't attained in my twenties!

      If we could all—mothers and daughters—find some compassion, we might have fewer conflicts.

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    2. Thank you, Judy! I think Rosemary Kincaid is the mother I'd like to have had, too. Although we mostly see her from Duncan's point of view, and I suspect that her relationship with her daughter, Juliet, is more complicated and more fraught.

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    3. But Debs, you can make her relationship with her daughter any way you desire!

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  8. Mothers and daughters, especially during adolescence! I love writing the teenage daughter-mother relationship. The highest compliment I received from my teen daughter: "Mom, I'm really glad you dress like a mom (sweats) instead of a cheerleader mom. You know, the moms with ponytails tied with ribbons and pink lipstick to match their pink warmup jackets."

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  9. Possibly the most fraught time! Such a push-pull relationship. "I want to get away from you/I want to be close to you. I want to be like you/I don't want to be anything like you." And on and on!

    I don't talk much about Sydney's adolescence; the pivotal family event revealed in Dead In The Water happened when she was eight. Perhaps I'll check back with the sixteen-year-old Sydney at some point!

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  10. I look almost exactly like my mom. I don't think I did when I was younger, but maybe I just couldn't see it until I reached ages at which I had seen her. Like you, it occasionally catches me off guard and takes my breath away.

    Mother daughter relationships are fascinating. I've noticed they seem to be front and center in a lot of women's fiction. Hardly surprising, I suppose, since they are such a shared experience for all women.

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    1. Oh, Susan, glad I'm not along in seeing my mother's face in mine! It *is* a fascinating relationship, and so unlike all the other family dyads. We're so influenced by our mothers, and usually in ways that neither the mother nor the daughter would have predicted.

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  11. Apparently I do resemble my mother because once a nephew said to me, "Wow, you look a lot like Grandma; thank goodness you don't act like her!" I laughed at Edith's comment about her midsection since that's true for me, too.

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    1. That's *funny*, Emily. We inherit a lot. And sometimes we don't have a whole lot of control over how much of that.... shows!

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  12. My mother and I didn't really "get along" well until she was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 14. Then everything changed. I've got six years yet until I'm at the point where you are Jeanette. Where I will be older than my mother when she died. Many was the time raising my own kids I wished I could talk to her (and that is still true). I've never been able to replace that "motherly" presence in my life.

    The theme of families is going to be big in the book I'm starting next month, so my protagonist is going to be exploring her own (rather prickly) relationship with her mother. Should be interesting.

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    1. Yeah, the world stops for a moment when your mother dies, doesn't it? My mother and I had far more profound issues than my protagonist has with her mother, yet I always knew, whatever was going on, wherever I was in the world, I could call her—sometimes crying—and she'd piffle on about roof repairs or what my father was doing or who she'd seen at the supermarket, and then when I was calmer, she'd say, "All right, tell me, what's wrong." It was one of the few times I felt real acceptance and support. And I'll tell her, and she'd help me find a way through whatever it was.

      I miss that now. I wish I could still call her.

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  13. One of my favorite books, one I have read several times since it came out in the early sixties was Mothers and Daughters by Evan Hunter. I always loved that book but just now it strikes me that I have a whole different understanding of the relationships between mothers and daughters. Reading it as a teenager brought up one set of emotions but reading as a grandmother I looked at the situations from another perspective. Relationships between mothers and daughters change over time as do our relationships with characters.

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    1. So true, Judi! I wish I'd known when I was a surly adolescent what it was like to live with a surly adolescent! I vaguely remember reading that book—will have to revisit it.

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  14. You talk about the weight of parental expectations. I read that as my expectations of my mother. I had a sudden realization that my expectations of my mother were far greater than her expectations of me. Were our roles always reversed that way? It seems like it. I see some of this in Sydney especially when Sydney's mother longs for Sydney's approval of her - or am I just projecting my own mother-daughter relationship onto Sydney? This is what makes exploring the relationship in fiction so rich. It is intensely personal and as readers, we interpret and mold it into our own experiences with our own mothers.

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    1. Yeah, I don't think any of us can read about these relationships without inserting at least part of ourselves into them. It's what makes fiction therapeutic!

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  15. What a wonderful essay, and so thought-provoking! Yes, I have caught glimpses of myself and thought I saw my mother… Not just my face, but certain expressions, or positions of my hands. She was incredibly talented, and quite brilliant, and incredibly judge mental. One of her favorite sayings to me was “I’m not criticizing, I’m just observing. “ It’s interesting, though, even though our relationship was incredibly close but also equally contentious, she’s been gone for 11 years, not a day goes by that I don’t think of her with affection and appreciation and humor.

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    1. I like to think that with time my mother's judgmental side might have faded, though I do know that's probably wishful thinking! But like you, Hank, I think of her every day... though with a range of different emotions. She had wanted to become a writer—I do have a slim notebook filled with her poetry—and I think in some ways resented my accomplishing what she hadn't. Like I said, we made different life decisions. I think we both regretted some and rejoiced in others. Which makes us, at the end of the day, fairly normal...

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  16. What a thought-provoking essay, Jeannette!

    My mother is still alive, and if it weren't for her rude bout of COVID in November she would still be her feisty self. Even as frail as she in in body, though, she is still strong in mind, voice (stronger than mine), and as on top of things as ever. As the matriarch of a huge Catholic family, everyone loves Aunt Joan/Granny Smith, and she gets a dozen phone calls a day.

    That said, we have a crusty relationship, and always have had. I've always felt she was unfairly more critical of me than of my siblings, rightly or wrongly. And I cannot remember ever getting a hug or kiss in my entire childhood until my first wedding day in 1970. But that dynamic made me parent my own three daughters differently, much less critically and more accepting and loving. Not that it was perfect; they have all, at some point, complained about aspects of their upbringing that obliquely laid blame for various issues at my feet. Oboy.

    Being a mother is not an exact science, apparently. I'll just have to leave it at that.

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    1. I love your use of the word "crusty" when applied to a relationship, Karen! That's very descriptive. And I suspect a number of us could well own it. There's definitely a thread here about criticism and judgment... doesn't feel like so much of a one-off when you hear other women saying similar things.

      Well done for learning from your mom and being a different kind of mother... but I think that no matter what we do, that uneasy relationship between mothers and daughters will persist.

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  17. My mom had three boys. I heard her say once “What would I do with a girl?” I only know a little about my mother’s relationship with her mother but some of it is quite telling. When I was about 12 or 13, my grandmother called my mother and was very upset because my grandmother’s sister, who she had not seen in perhaps 40 years, was coming to visit New York City and wanted to stay with her. She was frantic and distressed to the point that my mother asked her why she wouldn’t be happy to see her sister after all that time. She replied that my mother didn’t understand, when they were young together, they always fought. Well, when Peppy, (my great aunt’s name), arrived, my mother had a revelation that she told me about years later. My mother said that watching the two women interact and she understood all the friction that she, my mother, had had with her mother for years. Peppy was quick witted and did not suffer those who were slower in temperament. The conversations that the two older women had, mirrored my mom’s own relationship with my grandmother when growing up.

    My grandmother grew up in what was then Poland in the early twentieth century. She emigrated to America in late 1928 with a son who was probably about 7 or 8 to rejoin her husband, my grandfather, who had come to America about 8 years before her. I think my great aunt emigrated to then Palestine much later when the dangers for Jews in Eastern Europe were much more serious.

    I think Peppy knit a sweater for me before she returned to Israel. About 20 years later, I travelled to Israel. Other relatives, whom I had never met, picked me up on the Saturday after I arrived and took me to visit other older relatives. At some point, in the car, I asked about Peppy. There was silence in the vehicle. I asked again and I was told that “There are some people Peppy talks with and some whom she doesn’t.”

    While visiting older relatives on that outing, I got to see pictures I had never seen before, including some of my mother and her family when she was young and growing up in the Bronx. My grandfather when he was a young man who looked almost exactly like my uncle Noody (Nat).

    At that time, Peppy was in her 90s, and lived on a moshav (something like a kibbutz) in the northern part of Israel. Not being a driver, I could not figure out transportation during my stay there. I’ve not returned to Israel since.

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    1. Oh, David, I can only *begin* to imagine the conversations and silences in those relationships... I do hope you'll end up writing about this. If nothing else, it's the backdrop for an amazing mystery!

      I began to understand some of my mother's attitudes toward me when I realized how much I had in common with my grandmother. I'd always known that my mother hated her (I'd never met her), but when I'd pick out a hot or a picture or anything, my mother would get angry. Turned out my tastes and those of the hated mother were very similar.

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  18. Ah yes, I recall the moment when my eyes went from a photo of my mom to my own face in the makeup mirror and I saw Mom's face in my mirror. Even in her final illness, her main concern was her five children, five grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. As a friend put it, "no matter how old you get, you're still your mother's baby" and when I'm sick or troubled, I still wish for my mom. She achieved extra, active years by quitting cigarettes, but I wonder, what if she'd never smoked at all? I'm now approaching her final age, and wishing I'd asked more questions when I could have.

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  19. Oh, Mary, that's absolutely it. I wish I'd asked SO many more questions, about a whole plethora of things! (That's an interesting thought to give to a character, taking notes here...)

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  20. What a thoughtful essay!

    I remember the first time I glanced in a mirror and saw my mother. I was at the hair salon. It was a telling experience. My relationship with her was never easy, yet I firmly believe she did the best she could with the tools she had. She was 10 when she lost her own mother. It was the heart of the depression. She was shuffled back to upstate New York where she was raised on the family farm by her grandparents and later by her aunt who was only a few years older than she.

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    1. You know, Kait, I think (I hope) that that's generally trie: we all do the best we can with what we have (resources, information, age, etc.) at any given time. It's important to remind ourselves of that sometimes.

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  21. Jeanette, what a wonderful essay. I'm sure I'm beginning to resemble my mom physically in some ways, but what I'm noticing more and more is that I seem to be developing her habits and mannerisms--most of which I found extremely annoying! I loved my mom--she died in 2013 and I still miss her every day--but I didn't want to BE her. These relationships are so complicated, especially for those of us who have daughters. Which mother/daughter patterns from our own history do we emulate, and which do we reject?

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  22. Rhys, thanks for introducing us to a new author. Glad you had the opportunity to become friends with your Mom as a grown up.

    Jeannette, what a great essay!

    In Disney stories, has anyone noticed there are No mothers? Always the wicked stepmother?

    One of my favorite series is the Bakeshop novels by Ellie Alexander. The mother and daughter relationship is very close.

    Diana

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  23. Mother-daughter relationships are endlessly fascinating, Jeanette, and are a great underutilized source of conflict in crime fiction especially. I adored my mother and she drove me crazy; I love my daughters to bits and I know, inevitably, I will drive them crazy as well. We try to do things differently than our own mothers, but we just wind up making new mistakes.

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    1. Well... we make new mistakes, but hopefully we also do new wondrous thing, too!

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    2. Julia, I wonder if it has something to do with personality differences? What is your MBTI and your daughters' MBTI?

      Diana

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  24. The mother and daughter relationship is especially interesting to me in comparison to the mother and son relationship. I think the mother-son one is much easier and less fraught with emotion. The mother-daughter relationship, to me, comes with more expectations and complications. I say this not because of any difficulties I experienced as a daughter or as a mother of a daughter, because both were/are loving relationships for me. I just think mothers expect daughters to be more extensions of themselves and to want some of the same things they do, and it can put a strain on the relationship. With sons, I think there is more of an acceptance for whatever they are, an easier give and take. My mother loved me like crazy, and I loved her back, but I think I was expected to adhere to certain requirements my brother wasn't, and there was a closer monitoring of behavior (luckily, i was a goody two-shoes). I have a close, wonderful relationship with my daughter, who is 37, but I still think there were expectations of closeness that at times got in the way, whereas my son and I developed a close relationship by just allowing it to be what it was.

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    1. Kathy, I agree. Maybe it's back to that mirror ting... that we're too much alike, we mothers and daughters.

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  25. Interestingly, both our son and daughter are foreign adoptees. We discovered when our daughter reached adolescence that adopted girls tend to have a shakier time than boys do. Something about that mother/daughter bond starts REALLY early.
    She's now a mother. Wonder what she thinks now?

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