The School for Good Mothers
This book made me so tense, which doesn’t happen often. (While reading a book, I mean…)
Truly, The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan is heavy, and I felt as if I were holding my breath for much of it. Our protagonist, Frida — a newly single mother to a toddler — experiences a lapse in judgement (as might happen when one is under stress while also acting as caregiver) and is sent away to a place where the goal is for her to learn how to be a “good mother” via an intricate step-by-step curriculum that helps mothers modulate and regulate not just their actions, but their emotions as well. What follows is a heartbreaking illustration of what might happen when “the powers that be” intervene to reform women they deem to be the worst thing imaginable: a bad mom. Is this a dystopian novel? Yes, a tinge. But mostly it’s the kind of story that makes you think, “nah, this couldn’t happen” until you realize that on some scale, in some ways, it already is. Chan’s depictions of different cadres of mothers at the “school” and how they interact with and are viewed by others is so tightly woven and observed.
Besides the nuanced commentary on the standards placed on mothers — not to mention how they might change from one mother to the next — I was really struck by one subtext: the lack of friendship and camaraderie with other mothers prior to Frida’s arrival at “school.” In her case, it’s friends falling away because they’re not mothers too. In some people’s cases it might be, oh I don’t know, an indifference toward new arrivals to a community or an unwillingness to open up existing circles of friends.
Writing about motherhood in a meaningful, non meme-y kind of way is really difficult. Add The School for Good Mothers to the ones that have done it well. Just off the top of my head: Room (Emma Donoghue), Future Home of the Living God (Louise Erdrich), Frog Music (also Emma Donoghue), Unless (Carol Shields). What others would you add?
originally published on instagram