Zailckas~ Mother, Mother

Zebra Reads
May 31, 2023
3 min read

Updated: Jun 1, 2023

This is our very last book in the Z section for Zebra Reads,

and we will be looking at the book Mother, Mother by Koren Zailckas. Zailckas is again, yet another young, contemporary American author. She was born in 1980 in the US north east. For all intents and purposes it seems as though she had quite a bad childhood and she coped through reading and writing. She attended Syracuse university and focused mostly on writing poetry.

She started writing memoirs, called Smashed, of her teenage life, during which she drank to cope with her abusive childhood with an alcoholic father and a mother with psychological issues. She was only 23 year old at the time. She followed up Smashed with another memoir called Fury: a Memoir, which focuses more on her psychological state of being.

After her two memoirs she moved to writing fiction. Mother, Mother is her first, written in 2014. She has since written another a 4th novel (The Drama Teacher) which is supposed to be turned into a television limited series, but I did not see anything about this as of yet on-line.

Zailckas is an interesting personality. Most everything I see about her focuses on her decision to not say she is an alcoholic, despite her clear abuse of alcohol as discussed in her first memoir. She claims that she has the abuse part of alcoholism, but never felt the actual addiction part and so therefore says she is not an alcoholic. Her critics suggest that if not an alcoholic she is unqualified to throw her hat into the ring to help the increase in alcoholism in teens during the 90s and 2000s. She suggests otherwise. Zailckas is also apparently a huge animal lover and raises rabbits, which have been bought by other famous people (or so Wikipedia says)?

What it’s about: A dysfunctional family (The Hursts), and the mother (not a big surprise from the title) who holds it together. It is a story taken from the point of views of two siblings (Violet and Will) and, how they each interpret their family. Violet is a strong willed and volatile teenager, who ends up in a psychiatric hospital for a short stint. Will is a coddled, home-schooled, pre-teen momma’s boy. Their mother, Josephine, is a force to be reckoned with. Life is dangerous in the Hurst home, where addiction, narcissism, and outward perfection collide.

My take: I have decided that all three of my children need to eventually read this book, if for no other reason than to hopefully realize that I am not such a bad mom after all. I was drawn into the story. The outcome was not happily ever after, but it was genuine. No one really wins in a real-life story like this one, and no one really won in the book, either. Violet is the only character I could empathize with, and she at least found some peace. Her father deserved better in the end and Josephine deserved far worse. I appreciated this book because it told a hard story in an honest way.

Who should read it: This book would be fine for older teens, and in fact I might even recommend it. In one sense it points out the typical characteristics of a narcissist, which would be somewhat valuable for anyone. In addition, it also subtly encourages young adults who are stuck in bad environments to trust their instincts and seek help. However, it does have strong language, drug use (recreational), discussions about addiction, and some amount of sex, so gauge the intended audience carefully. Adults who might want to understand and better empathize with the emotional rollercoaster associated with sociopathy and addiction might also find it interesting, even with it being purely fiction.

Who should not read it: This book would have a content warning anyone who grew up in a home with an abusive (especially an emotionally abusive) parent. It also might be particularly difficult for anyone who has lost a child, or who was close to someone who committed suicide. The emotions within the book are really complex, and I doubt younger teens would be able to appreciate the scope of what was happening throughout the story. Also, if you want a fair ending to a sad story, you won’t get one here.

Bottom Line: A difficult story about the struggle children go through to break the cycle of dysfunction within their family.

Want to buy it?