“If we knew , if we understood when we were young how crucial childhood is , no one would ever dare have children.”
In Is Mother Dead, Johanna, a middle-aged artist, considers reconnecting with her estranged mother when she returns home to Oslo for a career retrospective of her work at a prestigious museum.
She has not spoken to either her mother or sister for almost thirty years, during which time she married an American painter, had a son, and refused to return home for her father’s funeral.
Now back in Norway, Johanna interrogates her choices and questions the way her mother raised her and her sister. In doing so, she remembers painful memories, saying, “The first song I ever heard was Mum crying by my cradle.”
When she imagines what reuniting with her mom will be like, Joahanna admits to herself that, “Perhaps visiting Mum is fun. Nevertheless it’s easy to imagine how visiting Mum might be a chore…”
Sometimes Johanna hopes that her strained relationship with her mother is due to nothing more than a misunderstanding or poor communication. She feels that, “A child may have to rebel against its parents in order to discover its own will and find its own path, and if the parents can accept that, the family members can ultimately establish a more equal relationship.”
At other times, Johanna feels that her mother is the one who needs to explain herself and atone for all the times she criticized or belittled her. In one memory, Johanna recalls,
Mum asked me why I keep clearing my throat when I do my homework. But I couldn’t explain it to her. She got cross…I think it’s because the throat is between the head and the heart . And when I do my homework , I can’t feel my heart . And then I lock my throat so that my heart can’t get into my head. But if I tell Mum, she will say I’m being silly.
Johanna’s desire to both understand her mom and be understood by her drives the novel’s plot and emotional engine. Everything she does is an attempt to reconcile her memory of her mother with the woman she’s stalking in the present. Johanna’s revelations often bring her more pain than solace, yet she remains to determined to understand what lies at the heart of her mother’s cruelty and indifference.
With raw emotion expressed through lean, plainspoken prose, Is Mother Dead exposes the raw nerves that live at the heart of every relationship and pokes at the lasting wounds we all carry from childhood.