The Bad Mother
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The Trillium Award-winning autobiographical novel "La mauvaise mere" by Marguerite Andersen is now in English.
Prolific author Marguerite Andersen traces the important moments of her life in this honest and harrowing examination of motherhood. She gives an unflinching account of her relationship with her three children and her years spent following her caprices and lovers, trying to regain the agency she lost when she became a mother.
Born in Germany, Andersen was fifteen years old when World War II began. Just into her twenties, she became pregnant with her first son and moved to Tunisia with her French lover before the birth. They soon were married and it was not long before the relationship became abusive. Andersen fled, leaving her children behind. She confesses the large and small choices that she made – the times she stayed and the times she didn’t – all the while asking herself, “What kind of mother am I?” The story is fuelled by emotion as Andersen revisits a period of her life that tortures her still today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published in French as La Mauvaise M re in 2013, this book from Andersen (Le Figuier sur le Toit) won the Trillium Award. Andersen adheres to neither grammatical nor poetic conventions while writing in the French tradition of confessional, autobiographical fiction (she cites Rousseau as her chief muse), so the book is both a novel and a memoir. As such, the work feels experimental, but interesting, welcoming, and intrinsically relatable despite its deeply personal subject matter. The work traces Andersen's relationship with her three children as she lived with them, and at times apart from them, in Tunisia, Germany, Ethiopia, and Canada from the time leading up to the birth of her firstborn in 1946 to the present day. Throughout, the work explores what kind of mother Andersen was and is, along with how being a mother affected her choices, her freedoms, and her overall personhood. Andersen writes with strength, even as she exposes her innermost doubts and perceived failings, and her confessional stream of consciousness style is eloquent and inviting, even when addressing difficult political and social issues. Every mother may have doubts, but few put them in writing with such power and grace.
