LIKE MOTHER

by Jenny Diski

The story of Nony, who is blind and dumb and who has nothing else to do but to tell the story of her remarkable mother, Frances. Through the symbiotic wisdom of mother and daughter and through the sharp and darkly humorous consciousness of Nony, the author reveals a new perspective on ourselves. Jenny Diski is the author of "Nothing Natural" and "Rainforest".

Genres: Fiction, Feminism

199 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Jenny Diski was a British writer. Diski was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction articles, reviews and books. She was awarded the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions.

Reviews

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

70/100

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tight, circular, cool, self referential narrative about a young girl's withdrawal from the everyday of emotions, desires and ambitions, fear and pleasure - stemming from a dysfunctional mother and father. Weird, creepy, affecting, manipulative, one is never quite sure of who's narrating or who's story is being told: aspects of Diski, who adds some of her own experiences to the narrative (I have just read one of her autobiographical books); the main protagonist's in her own book, as unreliable narrator; or the child without a mind who conjures up a listener? In the end, as the narrator says, she's telling just another story, not the truth - really enjoyed it.

[Rebekah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a harrowing, uncompromising book that I almost put down a couple of times; mainly because it seemed foolish to read something so brutal in such a distressing time. But the astonishing clarity, meticulous power and authority of Diski's writing kept on pulling me back.

It is, primarily, a book about childhood trauma, and its lifelong repercussions. About the fatal effects of being denied emotional care and security from birth, and the toxicity of social mores in the 50s and 60s, especially for women. There are so many ideas contained within this novel arising from psychoanalysis, feminism, structuralism, nihilism...I could go on.

I found the examination of the social traditions, morals, preoccupations and desires of a post-war British society, and the effect this had on the Boom Generation to be particularly insightful. It shows how collective trauma, passed on through generations, can be just as debilitating as personal trauma, and that, in fact, the two are completely intertwined.

The novel is narrated by the daughter of Frances, our traumatised subject, who, in a sci-fi twist, is baby born without a brain (the anhydranencaphalic child). I wasn't convinced by this to begin with, but grudgingly ended up admitting that it gave the book the cold, clinical, destructive power that was such a large theme of Frances's unhappy life. This is a book about rejection - Frances makes a pact to herself early on, that her life would be all about refutation - the refutation of love, of friendship, of ambition, of self-betterment. She wants to outrightly reject the life that she saw her parents lead:

"The panic boiled inside her. Better to stop the thing now then find herself where her parents were...She rejected the vision. Either she had to find a way back inside herself, back into the sanctuary, or she needed disaster to save herself from what life was capable of doing to her. In fact, they were not alternatives. It became clear that there was no way back into her refuge without dispensing with the safety net of hope. She had to know, through and through, really believe that it was true, that there was no risk in anything, because there was no hope that could be destroyed. She had to get rid of fear by rejecting hope."

Frances has a strange magnetic power despite her remove - people are drawn to her by the very fact of her nihilism, of her power to say No. It is the great irony of the book that no matter how hard she tries to self-immolate, she continues to triumph. Her rejection of emotion breeds an analytic, mechanical functioning body that drives her towards a successful career as a ballerina - the ideal job for one who wants to deny, punish, define, reshape and control the self and the body.

I was also fascinated by the character of Sandra, Frances's childhood companion (you can't say friend because she rejected this relationship, and used Sandra only as an accomplice to her petty crimes as a teenager). Sandra is a total opposite to Frances - warm and soft and pretty, where Frances is cold, and hard and striking. Sandra's curse was her extreme beauty and sensuality, which led to her intelligence being continually underestimated, her parents disgust, a teenage pregnancy, and an eventual decline into heroin addiction and prostitution. The novels energy derives from this constant interplay of opposites, the fizzing power of negativity, transgression and rage.

There is much to unpick in this novel, and I have nothing but admiration for the quality of Diski's writing - taut, eloquent, harrowing, and commendably honest.

[James Askari · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoughtful, concentrated study of female refusal and nihilism--though the opening of the story proper also reads as a characteristic, even-tempered (almost good-humoured) memoir of mid-Fifties London. Frances is scary in her self-containment and refusal to join. Her parents were casually, ordinarily hedonistic, Jewish but with no proximate or fearful sense of the Holocaust, or intimation of what it might have meant if Britain had lost the war. Their marriage sours, and fortunes head downward, with a sense of narrowing, shrinking choices, as Gerald's womanising and Ivy's avoidant drunkenness become more confirmed.

Their daughter discovers in herself a resource of indifference first tapped by a violation of her mother's norms of decorum, of not swearing and wearing white gloves and stockings. Distrusting her parents, finding that they lie as a matter of course as another child might find love and support, she soon understands that rebellion is a kind of faithfulness to what it pushes against, and becomes a passive or invisible resistor, a C rather than an A or E student. Her friend Sandra, whose brother is in line for a double First at Balliol, and who is viscerally sexy, asks for help, so that her essays get 'A's; Frances goes along with it, but it doesn't do Sandra any good. The man who loves Frances in adulthood became fixated on her during their early sexual experiences on a rubble-filled bombsite growing with groundsel and shepherd's purse. Four years older, Stuart is compelled to help her out as a science A level student when Frances wants to wipe herself out, passing to another sense of time and nothingness, with ether.

The story's notional narrator is the only child, perhaps, Frances would have allowed herself to have in her eventual (after her successful, will-powered career as a depersonalised dancer and muse) marriage to Stuart: the ironically named Nony, for 'non-entity', anhydranencephalic, unable to see, hear or feel. Her lower brain, regulating her eating and digestion and internal body functions, is intact, the hemispheres water. Neither daughter nor mother can disappoint each other, a great gift. Frances's detachment seems disproportionate to her formative experiences (Diski puts in an extra flashback scene of her mother leaving the house with her, walking aimlessly through the rain; the best scene in the book is Ivy scarily palping her pre-teen breasts and giving her own, toneless and like dead poultry, for Frances to hold, so that she understands the value and fate of femininity). Stuart is maybe more interesting in his psychological oddity, the helplessness of his attachment to Frances's isolation, acceptance of instrumental connections, and pure will. The book bucks feminine decorum, decency or good feeling, much more than the male or literary versions of these things. It is always engaging as a read; and the conceit of the non-verbal child recounting to a merely invented listener sustains itself, with listening, rather than any type of mythmaking or poesis being valorised.

[Rene Ijzermans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disky behoort tot één van mijn meest favoriete Engelstalige auteurs door haar soms tenenkrommend openhartige stijl, haar eloquente taal maar zeker ook door het duistere waaruit haar verhalen voortkomen.
Zoals vaker lees ik afwisselend een aantal romans. Net waar ik zin in heb, maar dit boek greep me al snel bij de keel en liet me niet meer los. Het verhaal wordt verteld vanuit een baby (Nulleke) met hydro-enencefalie (een aangeboren aandoening waarbij de hersenen ontbreken) en start bij haar geboorte. In een sfeer van onbegrip en onverschilligheid bevalt de moeder, Frances. Ze verwelkomt haar dochter op een manier die verbaast en prikkelt: “Wij boffen enorm, jij en ik. We zullen elkaar nooit teleurstellen.’
Dan begint het eigenlijke verhaal vanaf Frances’ jeugd waarin geen plaats is voor hoop of verwachting. Disky lijkt genoegen te scheppen in bizarre uitzichtloze relaties en situaties van waaruit getroubleerde zielen hun verrassende weg zoeken. Alle personages die Disky beschrijft hebben een merkwaardige levensloop, evenals uiteraard Francis. Ze groeit op tussen ouders die niet met of zonder elkaar kunnen en waar alcohol en ruzies dagelijkse kost zijn. Door de kwellende sleur van liefdeloze liefde besluit ze als kind niemand in haar leven ooit toe te staan. Maar niemand ontkomt aan ontmoetingen met betekenis, ook Francis niet. Het verhaal ontwikkelt zich aan de hand van een aantal contacten die verre van normaal verlopen, soms ook net iets te bedacht en eindigt tenslotte opnieuw bij de geboorte van Nulleke.
Het hele verhaal wordt vooral gedragen door de bijzondere schrijfstijl en de sterk psychologische en aparte uitwerking van Frances die me achteraf nog met vragen achterlaat.

[Gail · Rating 5 out of 5]

So beautiful and sad.

[Hal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a unique twist on the sad-child-to-sad-young-adult story. But pretty close to that line separating sad from too-bleak-to-read.

[Catherine MacLeod · Rating 4 out of 5]

To say I 'really liked it' is to exaggerate. It was disturbing, but insightful and beautifully written.