Narcissistic Mum Literature and Dismantling the Perfect Mother Figure
I find myself obsessed by the words of two women, Vigdis Hjorth and Jennette McCurdy. Although their voices differ, their focus is the same: the death of their mothers. The former wrote Is Mother Dead, is a domestic thriller in which an ostracised daughter returns to her hometown to track down her distant mother. The latter is the blunt memoir of Jennette McCurdy, detailing her lifelong struggle with an emotionally abusive mother who forced her into the acting career that made her famous. The reason I hang on their every word is that I share the trauma that plagues these women’s work. Just like the lost children turned grieving adults in these books, I am a daughter of a narcissistic mother.
The realities of growing up with a mother who consumed you, who poured her insecurities into her young daughter, is an experience I have never before seen so ruthlessly examined. When we think of a mother, we want to think of a woman who only gives - rarely do we see the violence mothers are capable of doing to their daughters.
It is for this reason that the brutal titles of both works are juxtaposed with bright, playful covers. Childhood trauma at the hands of mothers cannot be bleakly packaged. While Faye Dunnaway’s exaggerated performance in Mommie Dearest makes for great viewing, it is a tragedy that the memoir of Christina Crawford detailing the abuse of Joan Crawford, is now a camp horror with a cult following - not the harrowing expose it was intended as. Christina’s abuse was belittled by its cinematic adaptation. Her pain was given a camp gloss so it was palatable to an audience that dismissed Joan Crawford’s actions. A celebrity so idolised that audiences did not truly wish to comprehend the damage that Joan and or any mother is capable of inflicting.
Hjorth and McCurdy detail childhoods spent trying to manage the tides of an unstable mother. Is Mother Dead is Hjorth’s second work of fiction which draws on her own experience of ostracisation and a personal history of childhood abuse. Her debut novel Will and Testament, drawing on the same themes as its successor, is a novel that caused a media uproar, further family rifts and even a rebuttal from the author's estranged sister. Hjorth’s newly translated novel offers flashbacks of an anxious child listening out for her mother’s movements in the family home.
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“The reality of her narcissistic mother is at complete odds with the image of the nurturing mother figure that Abby holds in her head, the one she is still desperate to find.”
McCurdy’s memoir similarly details how she learnt to anticipate her mum’s moods. There’s a naïve pride to the statement: “I’ve spent my whole life studying her so that I can always know, because I always want to do whatever I can in any given moment to make mom happy”. McCurdy’s performance was never over, when she wasn’t in an audition crying on cue, she was setting a smile to appease her mother. She became an actor to make her mum happy; she counted calories to make mum happy; she even lied about her favourite ice cream flavour all to hold the shaky foundations of her world together.
Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing is a new horror novel that deserves pride of place in the narcissist mum TBR (to be read) list. As main character Abby is trying to deal with her grieving husband and the haunting spectre of a hypercritical mother-in-law, all while struggling to come to terms with her own mother issues. Having never received the care and support from her biological mother, she had once hoped this love would come from her mother-in-law. Now Abby is still desperately seeking a good mother, both in the care home she works at and within herself.
The reality of her narcissistic mother is at complete odds with the image of the nurturing mother figure that Abby holds in her head, the one she is still desperate to find. Even going as far as to confront the daughter of an older woman who lives in the care home. Despite never being raised by the woman and only experiencing her from the position of her caregiver, she insists Mrs Bondy isn’t a bad mother - to which the daughter quips “I guess I should let my therapist know”.
Hjorth’s Johanna also struggles with the stark contrast between the mother she knows and the mother figures she sees on screen. Pointing out that although the Richard Curtis movie Love Actually, is supposedly all about love, mothers are, for the most part, absent. Her theory being that “mothers are often absent in feel-good films” because they “trigger emotions far too complex” for the genre. It’s a great point - It is often only the lack of the perfect mother that is felt, as is the case for the widowed Daniel (Liam Neeson) and grieving step son Sam (Thomas Brodie). The same can be said for other heartwarmers, like Billy Elliot and Clueless. Johanna posits these films choose a dead mother over a living one because “it is easier to imagine a dead mother being good”. Letting the audience romanticise the mother rather than portray them creates an infinite well of caring and selfless characteristics.
There’s a hope for our mothers that we hold onto, one that still emerges even after we’ve faced our reality, even though we have long understood we will never be recipients of that doting maternal instinct. Hjorth’s fiction and McCurdy’s memoir perfectly illustrate this painful optimism. Drawing from her own experience of strained familial relations in Is Mother Dead, Johanna becomes so obsessed with a fantasy encounter where her mother will take responsibility for her wrongs that she begins to stalk her, standing in the cold outside her apartment hoping to be inviting into the warmth.
Part of me wants to parcel all these books up and send them on to my own mother, breaking a silence I have cultivated since leaving home, with the intention that amongst these powerful voices that articulate their pain she will finally hear my voice amongst them. But I know this is my own fantasy of acceptance. A known symptom of narcissism is an inability or unwillingness to recognise the emotions and needs of others. Therefore a narcissistic mother is rarely capable of accepting the pain they inflict, no matter how many books they read.
By the memoir’s end, McCurdy is left reeling from the emotional damage her mother has caused, working to overcome dangerous eating habits and discovering herself as an individual. Her mother’s death has freed her, but she still wonders that if her mum had lived, would things have changed. It’s a flickering fantasy that she stops in its tracks: “I’m just romanticising the dead in the same way I wish everyone else wouldn’t”. She knows that ultimately, her mother had no interest in changing and would refuse to see her own wrongs.
A lot of us have to come to terms with the loss of a mother figure, whether the woman is dead or not. We must grieve what society promised us and the mother we never got. Some of us are left wishing our mums were still alive in hope of a productive confrontation that may never come. Some of us are left with an ugly thought, a quiet guilt-ridden hope that our mums would die, if only so that in the eyes of others our ongoing grief will finally be legitimised.
Words: Billie Walker
