Ainslie Hogarth's Motherthing is a grim novel of family drama and mental illness, yet a bizarrely funny glimpse into one woman's mind. In its opening pages, Abby, who narrates, and Ralph have recently moved in with Ralph's mother, Laura, hoping to nurse her through her depression. But instead, Laura takes her life, Abby purloins Laura's coveted opal ring and Ralph falls into despair. "Because even though he'd been strong when we'd moved in, strong enough to move in--equipped with resources he'd downloaded from a website called the Borderline Parent... being near her stirred rotten dangerous things inside him."
Abby, very much in the throes of dealing with her own mother's shortcomings and abuse, has identified Ralph as part mother, part god, the "Perfect Good" in her life. Abby desperately wants to have a child of her own, to embody the kind of mother that neither she nor Ralph got to have. She works at a nursing home where she considers her favorite resident her "baby" and, simultaneously, the perfect mother she never had. This fantasy is disrupted by the appearance of the woman's real daughter, which might just push Abby over the edge. Because paired with her nurturing impulse, Abby secretly harbors intense rage. Her love verges on violence.
Hogarth (The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated)) rocks readers via Abby's turmoil, her swings from devotion to fury, self-loathing to self-aggrandizement. The result is a darkly comic, kaleidoscopic novel of unhealthy fixations, love, murder, the gifts and wounds that family can inflict and one woman's fight to save herself. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia