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is an inability to appropriately feel a sense of loss. As this narrator comes to realise, there can be little freedom from one's mother, even after her demise.
Not everyone has a mother, but everyone at some point will have had one, and therefore an origin, a starting point. In fairytales and classic novels, motherless children are forced to rely on their wits and an inherited compass to help them navigate a range of obstacles, from evil stepmothers to the orphanage and more existential concerns, towards an eventual sense of belonging. Though she is an adult at the time of her mother's death, the narrator of Queenless is rendered quite suddenly rudderless by her mother's passing – or, to use the apian metaphor which gives the book its title, "queenless." As Joan Didion wrote in her memoir Where I Was From, such a loss occasions a profound crisis of origins, no matter the age at which it occurs. Didion wrote: "It would be a while before I realised that 'me' is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from." It is a crisis imprinted on a narrator's subjective consciousness, altering and reordering their narrative, winnowing it to the bare bones of loss in the language imparted to them by their mother, their mother tongue. Marcinów writes in the book's heartbreaking epilogue:
There was a girl without a mother and without fingernails, a Disney princess.
And even though she was in mourning, she was terribly happy.
And even though she lived as an orphan, she was terrible.
And even though she was motherless, she lived, terribly.
And even though she lived terribly.
And even though she lived.
Laura Allsop is a writer and editor based in London, with a specialism in art and culture. Her writing has appeared in AnOther Magazine, ArtReview and The Guardian, among other titles.
There was no true distance between the two of us. Rather, a sense of identification." Similarly, in Queenless, Marcinów writes that mother and daughter are almost indivisible. "After her death, she's in me all the more. I am closer to her now than ever before. What relief can there be in this?" Like Ernaux, Marcinów's narrator tends to her mother as she declines, going even further to keep a vigil with her up to and through the fateful moment. In the immediate aftermath, she engages in the devastatingly tender act of applying makeup to Lila's forever stilled face, effectively painting her mother's portrait. It is a painfully intimate moment, echoing moments in the narrator's childhood, when she would watch her mother applying eyeliner. Though it is a cliché that when a parent declines, the role of care-taker is transferred to the child, Marcinów suggests that these roles are not always so clear-cut, but rather symbiotic, in a state of constant negotiation. At one moment, the narrator remembers her first visit to a mental health clinic as a teenager, and a psychiatrist telling her that, "The crux of the issue is that your mother is your child." She later likens her mother's passing to the moment during childbirth when a mother mentally releases their child into the world. "You can die," she tells her.
Because a mother represents the figure above almost all others that a daughter cleaves both to and from, the relationship between them is often one of ambivalence, marked by strong cross-winds of emotion. Marcinów's narrator remembers her mother in conflicted memories, some fond, others painful. Though she is unable to view her mother from a distance, she is nevertheless unsparing in her remembrances, in a way that is occasionally unflattering to mother and daughter equally. This unflinchingness puts Marcinów's writing in company with that of Rachel Cusk in her new book Parade, and Meghan Daum, whose essay Matricidedetails Daum's "unspeakable" ambivalence towards her mother's illness and death. Towards the end of Parade, a mother dies, prompting the first person voice to splinter into "we", a crisis whose crux
Mothers and Daughters
By Laura Allsop
As the narrator of Mira Marcinów's Queenless points out to her beloved, mercurial mother Lila, the reason there are almost no books about women her mother's age in classic literature is "because when it was being written, women your age were long dead, mum." In classic literature, as in fairytales featuring orphaned protagonists, mothers are usually dead before the story starts, their death taking place in some narrative netherworld or even during childbirth. In Marcinów's book, however, a mother is the central subject, her death the crux as opposed to the pretext for the story. Here, as in other more recent women's writing on the subject of maternal loss, a mother's death does not predate the narrative arc but rather brings about its disintegration into diamond-bright shards that mirror the fracturing of her daughter's identity in the wake of that loss.
Marcinów's narrator builds her mother in fragments, across poetic, diaristic entries, impressions, tallies of behaviours and idiosyncrasies, songs. It is as if the totality of a mother is impossible to relate in traditional terms, any sense of objectivity precluded by the acute intersubjectivity of the bond. The narrator recounts how she would bat her eyelashes against her mother's cheeks as a child. "She allowed me to go that far. You could say we were quite close. We were eye to eye with each other." This closeness – this eye-to-eyeness – keeps the narrator from being able to see her mother at a remove. "I thought that I couldn't go any further, any deeper in experiencing my own life. No farther than my own mother." It is a subjectivity composed of impressions, temperatures, and moods, all tied to the immediate, sensory realm. In Annie Ernaux's shattering account of the slow decline of her own mother, I Remain in Darkness, Ernaux writes of her mother that: "I'm not sure that I could write a book about her in the same vein as A Man's Place.