The almost mothers review

   

	A first time mum struggles with her newborn baby. An alien examines the lives of Earth Mothers. A baby sleeps through the night at long last. Written with raw honesty, Laura Besley's debut flash collection, The Almost Mothers, exposes what it really means to be a mother.
Title The Almost Mothers Author Laura Besley Publication Date 20th March 2020 ISBN 9781913624002 Price £7 Format 129mm x 198mm 66 pp PRAISE FOR THE ALMOST MOTHERS “Glimpses into the multifaceted world of motherhood with honesty, beauty and humour” ~ Mahsuda Snaith “Laura Besley has created a cast of memorable, poignant, characters in powerful, contemporary and futuristic stories, laced with a dash of humour, that reveal various nuanced, acutely-observed aspects of motherhood” ~ Emma LEe	AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Laura Besley writes short (and very short) fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online (Fictive Dream, Spelk, EllipsisZine) as well as in print (Flash: The International Short Story Magazine) and in various anthologies (Adverbally Challenged, Another Hong Kong, Story Cities). The Almost Mothers is her first collection.
The Almost Mothers (Dahlia Publishing) is the debut collection of Laura Besley, twenty-six flash fictions about ‘what it really means to be a mother.’  Besley’s collection opens with ‘Mothers Anonymous’, in which one mother goes against the group ethos ‘we’re not here to judge’. In five short paragraphs, Besley evokes some key mother tropes to present motherhood as something outside one’s control, with varying results. She explores the compulsion some women feel to have children, even if their experience of motherhood doesn’t sustain them or is bad for their health, leaving the reader with the sense that motherhood is a disease; women are not in control; motherhood is greater than the individual.  In ‘Playing at Being Grown-Ups’, two girls discuss the ramifications of failing to look after a virtual bay for a school class that predicts their suitability to be mothers. Framed by the portentous blowing of bubble-gum, this story will have varying impacts for different readers as it raises questions about who gets to decide who is fit to have children, which is a frequent subject of debate from back yards, to tabloids, to child welfare offices, as well as what happens to the data that is collected about us. The third story in the collection, ‘Getting Ahead’, explores the futility of regarding a child’s development in comparison with others, as a sort of race. It pairs well with a later story, ‘Let Love Lead the Way’, as both stories mine the school yard antics of parents as well as children. This, like the previous stories, feels confidently written, from a distinct voice that has a lot to say. From the beginning of life, we jump to the end with the next story. ‘Near and Far’ gives us an adult child’s perspective of their mother, revealing genetics has little power over warmth and food when it comes to bonding. It also illustrates the absence of opportunity for a child to consent to anything that happens to them, which, if extrapolated, raises questions for all of us, whatever age we are, about what age we must be to have agency over our own lives. ‘Everything’s Fine’ is another story that has its twin in this collection. A mother hides her exhaustion from a doctor, the subtext brought into relief by the foreshadowing of ‘Playing at Being Grown-Ups’. These stories form a cohesive whole and the collection feels slick and well curated. And here it takes a turn into the unexpected, which injects some energy into what might otherwise feel, well, mothered. ‘Down to Earth’ is a refreshingly brief list story in which an alien from outer-space contemplates the aids and impediments to human population increase. Besley’s stories are deceptively simple, and its often the smallest ones that provoke the greatest thoughts. Conversely, perhaps the least realised of the stories is ‘All the Children’, which, in its use of gendered colour for shorthand, jarred with the thoughtfulness of the other stories, felt like it needed to be longer.  ‘Wish Upon a Star’ was the least explained of the stories and the most powerful for it. It hints at Sudden Infant Death Syndrome without venturing into what could in less skilled hands become sentimental or irksome storytelling. When Besley gets the balance right, as she frequently does, the stories really stand out.  The mundane routine of motherhood is countered by the excitement of shoplifting for the middle-class mother in ‘Hooked’, another great companion piece for the collection’s opening story, ‘Mothers Anonymous.’ Class issues run through this collection. In ‘Breakthrough in Motherhood Programme’, “unwanted motherhood” is countered with a sort of ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ cure. Economics and class-discrimination, sexism and social control are all touched upon in this deceptively simple story.  ‘How to Grow Your Own Baby’ reads like a critique of the oversimplified advice thrown at mothers who have fertility issues and has a prose poem quality that supplies freshness at the almost half-way point of the collection. Perhaps it’s the change of tone, then, that makes ‘That Face’ stand out as heavy-handed; where other stories leave the reader to work something out, invest something of themselves, this story feels the most made-up. With a further edit, it could have the impact it self-declares it has. 2056: A New Generation imagines a future with a dwindling population and provides a nice counter perspective to ‘Down to Earth’. It’s clear that Besley has thought this collection through, tested her own story-telling skills in the process, successfully. Unsurprisingly, then, the most successful story in the collection is the one it takes its title from. ‘The Almost Mother’ is about what the word ‘mother’ means. In one interpretation, it could be said that it explores the word’s ability to destroy those who invest their trust in it.  ‘Supermum’ is a funny take on the standards mothers are held to and the hypocrisy of those who often boast their perfection in public while practicing what they preach against at home. The humour continues into tragedy in ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’ in this look at the ridiculous length mothers can go to for some time to themselves, all while their babies sabotage their every effort, then trying to give the impression that everything is totally OK.  In ‘Breaking the Seal’ a woman contemplates opening an envelope that will give details of a child, presumably that she can adopt, with all the hallmarks and incumbent subtext of a mother putting off lifting a baby from a cot.  ‘That Apple’ is an excellent story about how women turn on their own. Another particularly strong story is ‘In Hiding’. Besley shines when she ventures into speculative fiction and alternate history, redolent of The Handmaid’s Tale, as she evokes the horrors of the Nazi occupation in this story about a woman who hides her child in a cupboard, which could also be a metaphor for pregnancy itself.  ‘The Unmothers’ imagines a world where women are abandoned by their partners if they do not produce a child. This story raises more questions and also highlights the absence or limited role of fathers in this collection.  Besley is again on strong ground with this fairy-tale-like story ‘Hello, Again,’ and a fairy godmother character every new mother will recognise. In another fairy-tale, ‘Guilt Trip’, a fairy is rebuked by her superior for spending too much on “guilt dust” to keep mothers in check, cleverly sprinkling in reference to the real bureaucracy women face when they become mothers. Beautifully understated and probably my favourite of the collection. Rivalry is a strong theme in many of these stories, bringing to focus how women are pitted against one another in our society, and ‘Let Love Lead the Way’ is a good example of it. Though predominantly hetero-normative, these stories cover a huge range of experiences women have prior to, during and post pregnancy, as well as when they become mothers. ‘Not All Linings are Silver’ is another story touching upon government intervention, with some comparable features to ‘Breakthrough in Motherhood Programme’, but it goes further, moving into the territory of bodily autonomy, agency and consent. A scarily prescient read.  ‘A Bedtime Story’ is a reminder that mothers aren’t necessarily biological. Which leads nicely to the final story, ‘The Motherhood Contract’, a story to dispel all the myths of motherhood. These stories, as so many of the pieces in this collection, would make excellent study pieces for students at high school and beyond and I'd love to see Besley expand her ideas into longer works of fiction. Overall, Besley has produced an impressive debut, a tight collection that delivers some hard-hitting stories about what it means to be a mother. What is surprising is that it also reveals what it means to not be a mother. All packaged in deliciously deceptive bubble-gum pink. In a period of history where women's bodies are under threat, Besley's work is necessary and she and her publisher Dahlia are to be commended and supported. Buy this book.

For further information, review copies and to arrange interview requests please contact:

Farhana Shaikh on f.shaikh@dahliapublishing.co.uk

All the beautiful liars

All the Beautiful Liars

Kia ora, Sylvia, and welcome to the blog. Congratulations on the publication of your novel All the Beautiful Liars, published by EyeBooks.

Eye Books are a non-fiction publisher. They describe your book as: “Inspired by [your] own life story,” and a “richly imaginative debut novel”. 

In your blog post about your book, you call it a fictional memoir.  

Fictional memoirs have caused controversy from their conception; Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel comprised of the ‘found’ letters of a house maid and provoked the satirical response Shamela. In the 1990s, the Australian author Helen Dale, publishing as Helen Demidenko, came under fire for her “literary deception” The Hand that Signed the Paper, when she claimed she was the daughter of ethnic Ukranians, writing from the point of view of a Ukranian peasant sympathetic to those who fought for Germany in WWII. Of course, the letters in Richardson’s novel were entirely fabricated, and Dale/Demidenko had English parents.

Dealing as your novel does with the Nazis, how do you delineate between the fictional and non-fictional aspects of your book? Why not write a ‘real’ memoir?

So good to be back in New Zealand, Rachel, even if only virtually this time. And thank you for such perceptive questions. Eye Books do publish non-fiction, but Lightning Books is the fiction imprint, so I´m in the right stable, although in a new imprint called Lightning Bolts. 

I thought you might mention Demidenko, but I´m glad  you ask why not a ‘real’ memoir? I´m from a generation where secrets stayed in the family, if they even got that far. I was born in Vienna, as was my father, and my mother was from the eastern part of Germany, which after WW2 belonged to the GDR for 40 years. We emigrated to Australia in the early 50s. I only know what I experienced and even then, what are memories, and are they really mine? How do they change over the years as we start to notice, wonder, explore? 

No, I don´t trust memoir. I don´t trust autobiographical writings. How am I to know if accounts have been embellished or embargoed? I believe in the ‘truth’ in the lies of fiction. 

Oh, and my novel doesn’t deal with nazis—I prefer to lower-case them—it deals with silences and lies. It deals with ordinary people and how they find ways to come to terms with their decisions, or the impossibility of such. We see it today all around us. People look away. Some because too much is at stake for their survival and that of their loved ones, some because they’ve given up, feel they can’t make a difference, and others who are swayed, who believe that the bully will win in the end. We must all see to it that s/he doesn´t.

Not only does your novel cover Nazi Germany, the family of your protagonist Katrina Klain were “involved with the Stasi in post-war East Germany”. Some writers might have felt one of those periods to be difficult material to address; how difficult did you find writing about these two very dark periods in Germany’s history? 

No, my novel does not “cover” nazi Germany. It explores the behaviour of persons caught up with actors in that period of history, due to the places where they were born. Ordinary people living in two very dark periods, I agree, of Germany´s history. But we do not hear their stories. I grew up on a diet of “Hogan´s Heroes” when tv first came to our Sydney house. The victor gets to write history and the jokes, and the “lives of others” are often forgotten. So, I was not writing about periods, I was writing about, trying to understand ordinary people, often too young and too naïve, like myself in another life, to be relegated to boxes with labels like “nazi” and “stasi”. I think here of The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert.

I’m thinking now about one of your short stories, The Burka, from your collection of short stories Mercury Blobs, another difficult topic, and I want to ask you what draws you to a subject; what’s the jumping off point for you? 

Ah, The Burka. That Viennese café is not there anymore. And I suspect the burka was really a niqab, but how come we can´t see the other having the same preoccupations we might? Losing hair due to cancer, but recovering, and making art out of teabags? Still laughing.

Like me, you’re not going to win Granta’s Best Novelist Under 40 award, but being over forty must have been of benefit to you writing your book – can you speak a little about what it’s like to have your debut published now, and how you think you might have responded if you’d been published earlier on? 

I started writing fiction in my early forties. I think I was looking for my own words. My first draft secured me a wonderful agent to whom I now dedicate my novel. I was very lucky to have had someone who nurtured and supported me for many years. She let me do my own thing – play with words, try things out – these were early days on the internet, pre-web days. There was so much to learn. It was far too early for publication. I needed guidance. I still do. There´s a hunger for learning when you sense time might be running out. I got my PhD in Creative Writing at 60, and although I don´t think you need a PhD to write fiction, the course stretched me in many ways as I had enormous literary and philosophical gaps to fill. It wasn´t an end, but a beginning. Anyway, I didn´t even want to write as a younger person, the world was my oyster and I was slurping it all up, the good with the bad. I could never have processed all that as a younger writer, and I needed to understand the dirty underbelly of power, which I only was able to do in part thanks to an exciting and stimulating non-writing career.

I can’t wait to read your novel, Sylvia. Congratulations again on your publication. What can we expect next from you?

Thanks, so much, Rachel. Well, I do believe that even breathing is political and so there will always be elements of that in what I do. I´m working on a tongue-in-cheek cozy crime novel that I want to write in German as it deals with Austrian politics, and what Anglo-speak person would understand that, or even care to? And there´s Ambergris, the novel I did for my PhD for which Debi Alper has given me feedback, and enough time has elapsed now for a revision. There´s also an old travel romance with recipes to revise, and I´m keeping fingers crossed for a novella in flash currently out there. And stories, always stories.

Thank you so much for coming on the blog to answer my questions, where’s the next stop on the tour?

The next stop is at http://beinganne.com  where there´ll be a Q/A and I hope the questions won´t kill me, even if they don´t make me strong?

All the Beautiful Liars

How true are the family histories that tell us who we are and where we come from? Who knows how much all the beautiful liars have embargoed or embellished the truth?

During a long flight from Europe to Sydney to bury her mother, Australian expat Katrina Klain reviews the fading narrative of her family and her long quest to understand her true origins. This has already taken her to Vienna, where she met her Uncle Harald who embezzled the Austrian government out of millions, as well as Carl Sokorny, the godson of one of Hitler's most notorious generals, and then on to Geneva and Berlin. Not only were her family caught up with the Nazis, they also turn out to have been involved with the Stasi in post-war East Germany.

It's a lot to come to terms with, but there are more revelations in store. After the funeral, she finds letters that reveal a dramatic twist which means her own identity must take a radical shift. Will these discoveries enable her to complete the puzzle of her family’s past?

Inspired by her own life story, Sylvia Petter’s enthralling fictional memoir set between the new world and the old is a powerful tale about making peace with the past and finding closure for the future.

Purchase Link

https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Beautiful-Liars-Sylvia-Petter-ebook/dp/B084HJWT1K

For a limited time, All the Beautiful Liars will be available for only 99p.

https://www.amazon.com/All-Beautiful-Liars-Sylvia-Petter-ebook/dp/B084HJWT1K

Author Bio –

Sylvia Petter was born in Vienna but grew up in Australia, which makes her Austr(al)ian.

She started writing fiction in 1993 and has published three story collections, The Past Present, Back Burning and Mercury Blobs. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of New South Wales.

After living for 25 years in Switzerland, where she was a founding member of the Geneva Writers’ Group, she now lives in Vienna once more.

Social Media Links – @EyeAndLightning  @SylviaAPetter

Taking in

I'm ever so grateful to Editor Helen Ivory, author of The Anatomical Venus and Waiting for Bluebeard, a poet whose work I greatly admire, for taking in my poem 'Gannets' at Ink, Sweat & Tears.

Poetry lav

Had an inspiring time at Janet Frame's House today in Oamaru, in the writing workshop led by Kate Camp & Shayne Carter. As well as a couple of poems, I came away with a piece of Janet's lav paper: a scrap of newsprint circa 1950. No #Covid_19 panic buying in Janet's house.