A Tale of Two Women--guest post by Jeannette de Beauvoir.

RHYS: Frist let me say that if my name was Jeannette de Beauvoir I'd think I'd died and gone to heaven. Doesn't she sound like a heroine from a medieval chanson? Who could be rude to someone with such a glorious name? And if I looked like Jeannette I'd be quite happy too. And her writing isn't too shabby either, with New York Times bestsellers.... so Jeannette, I'm really glad to have you as our guest today with such a meaningful and poignant post.

JEANNETTE: 

I recently passed a storefront and caught sight of my unscripted reflection—I’m more prepared, somehow, when I look in the mirror—and was surprised and somewhat aghast to see my mother’s face there. It’s a truism that women come to resemble their mothers, but this, I thought, was taking that way too literally. 

I’ve actually and oh-so-unintentionally come to look a lot like her. 

I’m now two years older than my mother was when she died (far too young, thanks to Philip Morris International), and it feels in some ways like I’m living in unexplored territory. While she and I made radically different choices and pursued nearly opposite directions for our lives, as long as I was younger than her, I felt a certain measure of safety. She’d been forty-six before me. She’d been fifty-eight before me.

Now she’s dead before me.

So I’ve been thinking about her, and our relationship failures and successes. But not just about her; about the theme in general. Mothers and daughters have a strange connection that’s been explored—in politics, in fiction, in nonfiction, in research—nearly ad infinitum; yet as an author, the connection’s a deep well I’ve come back to again and again, and it’s never failed me. 

The mother-daughter bond is often problematic. Our first relationship is with our mother, and what we learn from her becomes fiercely entangled with our sense of self. Our childhoods have a strong hold on us, and so a lot of fiction explores the possibility of—or failure to—rise above dysfunctional families of origin. I think all women have some sort of mother/daughter issue: friction is, you might say, part of the job description for both parties. 

Readers enjoy subplots in their stories, and mystery readers in particular attach to recurring characters and are always curious about the lives and relationships of those characters—in addition, of course, to the solving of the central crime or crimes in the story. We all enjoyed the development of Lord Peter’s love affair with Harriet Vane; Alan and Marta’s easy friendship in The Daughter of Time; the intricacies of Jane and Madeleine and Celeste’s interactions in Big Little Lies.

Or sometimes it’s those connections that are central to the plot. Agatha Christie and G.K Chesterton pioneered looking at emotions and relationships as being intrinsic to crime-solving. 

And what more intense, more fraught, more complex relationship is there to explore than that of a mother and daughter? It’s complicated, it’s scratchy, it’s enduring, and it’s interesting. I don’t think anyone in mystery writing does it better than Phil Rickman, author of the Merrily Watkins series. As the years pass, Merrily’s relationship with her daughter Jane shifts, morphs, develops, backslides… it’s always interesting, it’s often entertaining, and it makes the books rich and layered and relatable. Sometimes Jane’s presence is intrinsic to the mystery; sometimes she drifts in and out of a given story; but she’s one of those characters you feel you’ve really gotten to know, even if half the time you want to tell her to just cut it out.

In my current series, my protagonist Sydney has a mother who calls at inconvenient times, chatters incessantly about her friends’ daughters’ weddings, and refuses to acknowledge Sydney’s Muslim boyfriend. Unlike other authors, though, I didn’t set out to explore the mother/daughter bond; this mother was, you might say, there out of convenience. 

The first book in the series situated Sydney in an idyllic setting with a near-perfect life (well, except for the body in the pool, but you can’t have everything, right?). I needed to inject some conflict into her world, but not so much that it carried the story; her mother was the perfect foil. As the series has developed, so has Sydney’s “Ma,” and in the most recent book, Dead in the Water, we not only learn some of the reasons for the conflict between the two women but also see them coming to a fragile understanding of each other.

Of course, that’s pretty tame. Compare it to Stephen King’s Carrie—now there’s a relationship that’s gone horribly wrong!—or V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic, and Sydney’s mom is small potatoes. But whether they’re saints or monsters, whether we emulate them or rebel against them, our mothers are a defining influence in who we become. The weight of parental expectations, the need to separate and simultaneously get closer, the fierce love and fierce hatred, the rivalry, the missing mothers, the lost daughters… there is always such an entanglement of love and grief and joy and disappointment that we can’t look away. No matter who is writing, and no matter what the relationship, the interaction between mothers and daughters is evergreen. 

And I’m pretty sure novelists will still be exploring it a century from now.

RHYS: So Reds, who wants to chime in on mother/daughter relationships? Fraught? Wonderful?

My own was rather remote until I grew up. Then we became great friends.