The first sentence of Anna Karenina is now a literary cliche, yet contains a nub of truth. “All happy families,” writes Leo Tolstoy, “resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Literature brims with thwarted parents wreaking havoc in unique ways. We’ve considered the worst fathers. Now we look at troubling mothers.
A recent contender here is Arundhati Roy’s depiction of her tyrannical, infuriating yet seductive mother Mary in her new memoir.
But my choice for worst mother is a fictional character, also a Mary. In US author Sapphire’s arresting 1996 novel, Push, Mary is a violent, jealous woman who follows her husband in sexually abusing their teenage daughter, “Precious”. Amid poverty and deprivation, Mary challenges every maternal stereotype.
Here are our experts’ picks.
Stuff – Joy Williams
Your adult son has just informed you he has terminal lung cancer. Do you:
A) Say, “Oh, well.”
B) Demand he speak quietly so as not to disturb your roommate, Debbie, who is playing dystopian video games.
C) Disagree with the assessment that Gnosticism is a flawed religion incapable of forming any kind of true moral community.
D) Drink a stinger the bright green of antifreeze.
E) Kick him out because your radical silence class is about to begin.
F) Do all of the above: You are a mother in the hilarious void of Joy Williams’ story Stuff.
– Alex Cothren
Medea – Euripides
Goodreads
A princess of Colchis, she betrayed her own people to help Jason, leader of the Argonauts, capture the Golden Fleece, and then ran off with him and started a family. She kept her sorcery under wraps until Jason dumped her in favour of a princess of Corinth. This betrayal sparked a massive overreaction on Medea’s part. Not only did she murder the new bride, and the bride’s father. She slaughtered her own children and then, with the help of her divine granddad (the sun god Helios), skipped off to Athens to start a new life.
– Jen Webb
Daisy Buchanan, The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Penguin books
Classic literature is lavishly adorned with bad mums. I’m going with a sleeper hit — Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, aka the love of Jay Gatsby’s life. Daisy studiously neglects her daughter Pammy, a child of about two, throughout the novel. She says she hopes Pammy will grow up to be a “beautiful little fool”, and so, frankly, do the readers, just so poor Pam won’t ever know her mother cheated on her father with a guy who ends up murdered in his own swimming pool, after being mistaken for Pammy’s own father Tom. And here’s hoping Pammy won’t know her mom Daisy killed her dad Tom’s lover Mabel in a hit-and-run accident,