Daughter of a Difficult Mother: When Fictional Mothers Aren’t Gentle
When I consider the qualities a mother should have, my own mother serves as the template: she’s supportive, nurturing, still an open ear and a fount of gentle wisdom as I navigate my twenties. She embodies the warmth and comfort that society has long associated with—and demanded of—mothers, but not fathers.
But when I read Claire Vaye Watkins’s last novel, I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, I encountered an honest, unapologetic portrayal of a different kind of mother: one for whom motherhood is not an act of easy selflessness, but rather a complex burden. The protagonist, who shares the author’s name, struggles with her identity after the birth of her daughter, vacillating between a longing for emotional intimacy and desperation to escape.
The book has been polarizing on review platforms like Goodreads. Some find the character of Claire to be unlikable, self-centered, and frustratingly indecisive. One reviewer criticizes her for succumbing to selfish impulses and abandoning her family. (I can’t help but think of countless books where men abandon their wives and children to pursue their passions—Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom—and wonder about the double standard.) Yet other reviewers find it hilarious, honest, and refreshing.
Perhaps the tension lies in an unspoken rule about fiction: it can serve as an outlet for writers to explore difficult experiences, confront harmful stereotypes, and demonstrate exceptions to societal trends. But when fiction shows us something we might not like about ourselves—or something we don’t want to believe about other people—it breaks its escapist promise.
In a world where motherhood is still romanticized as a joyfully self-sacrificial role, and society often assumes that mothers always want to make these sacrifices, books like I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness challenge beliefs that uphold the convenient outputs of the patriarchy.
This character—the ambivalent, difficult mother—appears elsewhere in fiction, especially more recent fiction written by young women. She helps us understand how expectations surrounding motherhood interact with those around womanhood, creating insular cycles of generational influence. Many recent novels are told from the daughters’ points of view, showing us how difficult mothers are influenced by—and continue to perpetuate—unfair expectations of women.
Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, for instance, features a protagonist whose relationship with her mother fuels food issues and career insecurities even in adulthood. Though the protagonist, Rachel, openly disapproves of her mother’s regressive body standards and attitudes toward food, she quietly adopts disordered-eating practices that her mother would approve of. Discriminatory expectations leveraged against women become even more powerful when filtered through the influence of Rachel’s mother.
The dynamic between Lila and her mother in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend offers another example of a challenging mother-daughter relationship that’s amplified by social pressures. Lila’s mother is cruel; her interactions with her daughter, especially when Lila’s teachers celebrate her intelligence and creativity, betray a bitter resentment. This reluctance to recognize her daughter’s brilliance stems from jealousy—decades ago, she too was a girl with great promise. But since she never had the opportunity to become anything other than a housewife, she doesn’t want her daughter to, either.
In all these books, the absence of a gentle maternal figure creates a gap in the protagonist’s life, forcing her to seek validation elsewhere. These stories reveal where a mother’s absence of warmth and nurturing might come from—and how it can deeply affect a daughter’s sense of identity. Unlike classic mothers of fiction, today’s “difficult” fictional mothers struggle in ways readers will find relatable: they get angry, they worry about money, they resent their husbands and disapprove of their daughters’ choices.
These works offer layered, refreshing perspectives on the complexities inherent to mother-daughter relationships, a space where tenderness—where it exists—tends to coincide with tension. Claire’s story, like Rachel’s and Lila’s, reminds us that the bonds between mothers and daughters are rarely straightforward in their tenderness.
Fictional mothers who aren’t gentle don’t just drive complex plots forward; they hold a mirror to the messy, multifaceted reality of womanhood. These stories portray not only the pain and difficulties of mothering, but also the courage it takes to break cycles of generational trauma that involve both stringency and tenderness.