She mouths something, but I can’t make it out. I walk closer to the window and shrug my shoulders, shake my head — Say it again? I ask her. Say it again? She mouths the words slowly this time. And then she lunges forward. Her hands push against the window, like she wants to break through the glass, and she holds them there. I can see her chest rising and falling.
The Push is a quick, if unsettling, read — more potboiler than true psychological thriller — that treads some familiar ground about mothers and daughters and the inheritance of intergenerational trauma. Author Ashley Audrain does have some nicely observed moments — which helps to elevate this story above pure soap opera — and she uses a time-jumping formula to good effect. I can’t say that I was exactly entertained by this read, and it’s not like I learned anything new about the human condition, but I did keep reading to see how Audrain would wrap everything up. Three stars would be a rounding up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
We’d talked about it before, many times. You were practically gleeful when I held other people’s babies or got down on my knees to play with them. You’re a natural. But I was the one who was imagining. Motherhood. What it would be like. How it would feel. Looks good on you. I would be different. I would be like other women for whom it all came so easily. I would be everything my own mother was not. She barely entered my mind in those days. I made sure of it. And when she slipped in uninvited, I blew her away.
The novel is written in the second person, as though Blythe is telling the story of her life and their marriage to her husband, Fox, but it is also intended to eventually be read by their daughter, Violet. As the timeline moves back and forth, we learn that Blythe had been raised by a cold and mostly absent mother, who in her turn, had been raised by a cold and abusive mother. Having no family model for maternal warmth and caring, Blythe is nervous and excited to become a good mother herself; encouraged by the loving relationship she has with Fox. When Violet is born and is fussy with Blythe and obviously prefers her father, a self-perpetuating cycle of coldness and rejection begins: but who rejected whom first? Was Blythe, from the beginning, reacting to something repellant in her daughter, or did Violet simply recognise her mother’s empty heart?
You know, there’s a lot about ourselves that we can’t change — it’s just the way we’re born. But some parts of us are shaped by what we see. And how we’re treated by other people. How we’re made to feel.
