Mother can you hear me?

by margaret-forster

Angela Bradbury has an appalling mother -- self-sacrificing and an expert at emotional blackmail. But in her relationship with her own daughter, Sadie, Angela realizes she is imposing the same resentments and guilt that her mother inflicted on her.

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Helen Farrow · Rating 4 out of 5]

This so mirrored the on- going relationship I have with my Mother I almost felt I'd written it myself at times! Amusing for me & also echoed my own frustrations.

[Stephanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a story about family dynamics that reads like a horror novel. Seriously, the whole time I was just waiting for someone to leap out of a closet and hack someone else to death, which is about the only reason I read the whole depressing thing, in the hope that as least one of these characters would get killed off.
Yes, poor Angela has a terrible family, but Angela is about as sharp as a snowball, which makes it very difficult to feel any sympathy for her as she whines her way through life, ruining her poor kids in the process.
In the end, Angela is just astoundingly stupid. Maybe that's the point - is this supposed to illustrate her parents toxic influence? But still, she managed to move away from them, go to school and get married. She's living in London, (after traveling the world with her husband). She's obviously educated and well off enough to maybe buy a book or two on psychological disorders, or raising kids, yet this appears to have never occurred to her. Even when she does manage to have a tiny glimmer of self awareness, she can't figure out how to change anything and just keeps on destroying everything she touches.
Except for Angela's barely present younger sons and her husband, who's so "perfect" that he's basically a cipher, every person in this family is an overwhelmingly horrid, obtuse and wholly unlikeable human being.
There are plenty of unlikable characters in literature, and many of them make for great reading. What ruins this book is that everyone is just so incredibly stupid.
I can't figure out why the author thought this repulsive crew was worth writing about, or why anyone would want to read about these awful people. Silly me, I wish I hadn't.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book encapsulates the often fraught and complicated relationship between a mother and daughter. Seen from Angela a middle aged mother of three's point of view she navigates her upbringing and characters of her martyred mother and cantankerous father who have influenced her own way of parenting. This book to me captures an almost visceral feeling of a family who have unspoken and invisible rules to others that are both suffocating to live within and hard to run away from.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was torn between giving this a 3 and a 4. I think if it had been shorter, I would have given it a 4. Forster does an amazing job of showing us all of the subtleties of mother daughter relationships. But the painful pull between love and resentment, joyful giving and obligation, is portrayed at too much length and so it becomes as tedious as it does in real life. But anyone who has ever known and/or loved a person with a martyr complex will recognize the mother's passive aggressive behavior and the desperate need to please the children have developed in response to it. Even as someone without children, I found her portrayal of Angela's confusion over her relationship with her daughter astute. She only wanted her daughter to live without the guilt and neediness she herself grew up with but also wants to feel needed and is pained by her daughter's independence--the independence that she dreamed of for her.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐ I remember a discussion with my own mother years ago after both reading this novel. We would have been contemporaries of the main character and her daughter when it was first published. I recall finding the novel depressing and a disappointment when compared to Forster's early fiction writing. Reading it again, and with adult daughters of my own has given me cause to reflect. However I still found Angela's and Sadie irritating. The themes overwhelm the narrative of the story which feels laboured. Nevertheless it's a well written, thought provoking piece of writing. Some ideas have dated, but not so much that they jar (unlike The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury which I read prior to this). I think that's probably it for now in terms of coming back to this author.

[Felicity · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not great literature, but I found the toxic mother/daughter relationship very familiar. It reminded me constantly of my relationship with my mother. And though I adore my daughter, Angela's relationship with Sadie rang a lot of bells. Strange that this time I lived through, just a little younger than the protagonist, is now a period novel - no mobile phones, a major hospitalisation for an abortion, no reviews to warn Angela of grubby hotels...

[Evalitera · Rating 2 out of 5]

Its a stupid family story.
Manchmal in den Dialogen etwas Humor.
Niemand frisst hier die Töchter. Die Mutter ist sanftmütig. Angela ist diese übereifrige Frau und Mutter :“ich selbst zuletzt.
Dieses Buch ist so langweilig. So konventionell. Verlorene Lesezeit..

[Lizzie · Rating 1 out of 5]

What insipid characters. Sorry but I tried to like this book but really struggled to finish it.

[Kirsty Darbyshire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had numerous similarities with the last of Forster's books that I read Have The Men Had Enough? - beyond the fact that both titles end in question marks, they both deal with looking after the aging and with three generations of women. Written in 1979, this is the earlier of the two books and although it's quite harrowing in its own way it's a gentler version of the book Forster would write ten years later.

The narrative stays with thirty something Angela all the way through this book, she's a mother of four who teaches English part time in some leafy London suburb while her mother is suffering various illnesses in Cornwall. The key relationships in the story are those between Angela and her mother, and Angela and her eldest daughter Sadie. I could sympathise with everyone on every side, but did find aspects of the Sadie/Angela relationship to date the book a bit. Angela has brought up an independent teenager, never wanting to copy the strained mother-daughter relationship that she had, but I felt like I was supposed to think Sadie was some kind of monster whereas I actually thought she was a pretty standard teenager who would probably turn out just fine.

Another good book, Forster is fast becoming one of my favourite authors.

[Manda Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the main character sort of annoying. She constantly felt guilty about not doing enough for her mother. She was also constantly worried about making sure her own daughter didn't ever feel that kind of guilt, even though she was constantly disappointed by how little support her daughter gave her.

[Sarah]

I didn't enjoy this book. This might be the last Margaret Forster I try!! I couldn't work out the value of putting part of the story in italics - having got to the end, I'm still not sure whether it was to explain the actions of the main character, or the effect it had on her daughter. I was also disappointed in the ending. I guess I was just waiting for something more dramatic.

[Marie Theron]

With Angela's parents there is an undertone of glumness and she lives in fear of not doing enough, of saying the wrong thing. As the dark tense fear of critisism tires her, she is in danger of trying to place her own daughter's heartstrings in a grip. Can Angela learn to relax with her own family and allow Sadie a more carefree life?

[Nessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. So much to identify with. It describes with penetrating insight the tortuous conflicting emotions of the mother daughter relationship.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Margaret Forster’s writing and the way she explores intimate relationships between family members.