Mother's Day is, for many, bittersweet. Here are 8 books about pain and absence

A Like Father’s Day, Mother’s Day is not necessarily a happy occasion. For many, May 7th amplifies the feelings associated with mourning, loss, and absence, taking on different contours.

If many went through the visceral pain of losing a child, or even a pregnancy that did not progress, others no longer have a mother ‘to whom to give a gift’, or could never do so, given her absence.

Thus, in a society marked by positivism and capitalism taken (almost) to the extreme, those who have already experienced a traumatic experience associated with the maternal figure are relegated to the margins, trying to contain their feelings in a mute, in the face of the ‘noise’ that social networks (and not only) provide.

In that line, the News by the Minute proposed, once again, to compile some works that address feelings of visceral pain, loss and, above all, the love associated with a mother, in all its forms, from poetry to fiction, and even non-fiction.

Check out the list curated by Notícias ao Minuto below:

Tears in the Market, Michelle Zauner© DR

In ‘Lágrimas no Mercado’, the lead singer of the band Japanese Breakfast takes us through “the winding path to find out who she is”, which she found after her mother’s death, when she was 25 years old. Despite the grief and pain, the artist portrays, with humor, the connection she established “with her own identity, with the tastes, language, culture and music that are her Korean heritage”. Essentially, “everything his mother had left him.”

Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter© DR

In a moment of despair, marked by the sudden death of his wife, the father and children are visited by Corvo, attracted by the family’s mourning, who threatens to stay until they no longer need his help. The passage of time, combined with the “unbearable sadness that engulfed them in their London apartment before a coming and going of well-intentioned friends and a future of absolute emptiness”, shows, in ‘O Luto É a Thing with Feathers’, how this unit of three people begin to ‘heal’, turning pain into memory.

Blue Nights, Joan Didion© DR

Described as the sequel to ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, ‘Blue Nights’ — the long nights when twilights turn long and blue and signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the death of clarity, but also its warning “—depicts the death of Joan Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo, while giving a moving glimpse into the author’s “thoughts, fears, and doubts about motherhood, illness, and aging.”

Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong© DR

Ocean Vuong seeks, through poetry, the meaning of life among the ‘debris’ left by his mother’s death. In this line, she reflects on the “paradox of remaining seated with hurt”, while trying to find “the necessary determination to overcome it”. Delving into memories, and in tune with the themes of ‘On Earth We Are Briefly Magnificent’, ‘Time is a Mother’ focuses on loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being a product of a war in the United States. U.S.

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt© DR

Theo, 13 years old, inexplicably survives the accident that killed his mother, on the day they were visiting the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a rich friend. However, the teenager finds it difficult to adapt to his new life on Park Avenue, facing the lack of his mother as an intolerable pain. A small and mysterious painting that his mother had shown him the day he died becomes an obsession, leading him to enter the criminal underworld, already in adulthood. ‘The Goldfinch’ is thus described as “a powerful book about love and loss, survival and the ability to reinvent ourselves”.

I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy© DR

“Jennette McCurdy was six when she had her first audition. Her mother wanted to make her a star and she didn’t want to let her down, so she stuck to calorie restrictions and various homemade makeovers.” It is in this way that ‘Ainda Bem que a Minha Mãe Morreu’ is introduced to us, reporting all the details of the “spiral of anxiety” in which the actress found herself immersed when she was projected to fame, with her participation in iCarly. And the problems only get worse when her mother dies of cancer. Indeed, “it would take years of therapy, and leaving the stage, for the actress to recover and decide, for the first time, to do what she wanted”. Filled with dark humor, this story of resilience portrays the abuse Jennette suffered from her mother, but also “the pleasure of washing your own hair without help”.

Son of a Mother, Hugo Gonçalves© DR

“An autobiographical text, as moving as it is surprising, about what it’s like to grow up without a mother. It reads like a novel but is made of life.” ‘Filho da Mãe’ tells the story of Hugo Gonçalves who, close to turning 40, received his maternal grandfather’s will inside a plastic bag, transporting it to the afternoon when he received the news of his mother’s death, on the 13th. March 1985, when returning from primary school. The work thus portrays the search for “what time and flight had made him forget or what he didn’t even know about his mother”, lasting more than a year. The conclusion was this: “Whoever wants to write about death ends up writing about life.”

‘All Tomorrows’ portrays Amande Luzin’s refuge of “closed windows, darkness and silence” in the French countryside of Auvergne, where she hides “to live out her grief”. The young woman, who lost her daughter with whom she was pregnant and her husband, rarely goes out, avoiding the interference of light in her life. But everything changes when she finds the diaries and calendars of the former owner of the house she rented, Mrs. Hugues. “In round and elegant calligraphy, there are detailed instructions for caring for the garden and for making recipes, a kind of homemade almanac”, and with each seed planted, Amande “finds a sprout: in the swamp of her pain, each tomorrow brings a small, fragrant promise of the future”.

Also Read: “Grief, not being a disease, is a public health problem”