Surviving an abusive mother-daughter relationship

In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky writes: ‘It would be strange in times like ours to expect to find clarity in anyone.’ Given where the times have got to in the intervening 140 years, one would suspect that clarity would be even further from us. The clarity we seek is generally externalised, about the world and its workings; that which is most hidden is about our personal histories and our families’ intergenerational legacies. Nightshade Mother is the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis’s quest for clarity – a memoir of excavation positioned between what the infant experienced and what the adult has sought to understand.

Multiple narratives are in play: the voice of the child, the poet, the scientist and the psychologist. Lewis is adept at all these stratagems. ‘You were always so bright,’ her mother Eryl tells her accusingly, as though to lay with the child the fault of their mother-daughter problems.

Lewis’s family history is absorbingly described; but it’s in the matriarchal line that the poison lies. Her invalid grandmother Sara Ann passed the poison to Eryl. Eryl had two daughters, and couldn’t help reinstating the same dynamic she suffered with her older sister Megan, who was the favoured child. Eryl replayed, as rageful persecutor, her own childhood neglect.

Both before and after the second world war the family expressed their trauma through hoarding. Lewis’s grandfather, Dacu, was, on the face of it, a solid citizen – a successful headmaster, a stalwart on various Tregaron committees, who somehow found time to keep a meticulous weather log, auditing his entries as though they were scrupulous accounts. The image is resonant: children become a sort of register, adapting their personalities to the family’s weather system. Lewis’s father, Gwilym, was similarly disposed, keeping journals and even noting the date he inserted and used batteries in order to evaluate which brands performed best.

Families pass on habits, not just traumas. Lewis has inherited that meticulous propensity for turning the world into text: the narrative trail creates a coherence in a world the child could never fathom. You could call it book-keeping. Freud always turned to the poets first.

She mixes through her prose small snippets of her terrified internal world where her child-self and adult-self are in conversation: the child is confused; the adult is tender and reasoning, offering the voice of comfort that never came. In this painstaking labour, many readers will see their own stories reflected. Emotional discovery is the book’s gift; an act of self-reclamation that is heart-wrenching but ultimately meaning-making. Not to have meaning is to struggle to survive; to find it is to begin to live. As the psychologist Alice Miller argued in the 1990s, this is the only way.

In a rare moment of defiance, Lewis challenges her dying mother, even when she has long given up on any answers coming. Eryl says: ‘I always treated you and your sister exactly the same.’ Lewis replies, trepidatiously: ‘That’s not quite true, is it?’

Parents can shadow their children for a very long time. This compelling memoir, daring to voice its own truth, proves it can be done. Lewis is able to disentangle herself from her parents, banish mental illness and live – if not quite in the light, then on her own foundations. As she says, in a poem about her father – and, readers, believe it: ‘Despair can change.’