Surviving an abusive mother-daughter relationship

In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky writes: ‘It would be strange in times like ours to expect to find clarity in anyone.’ Given where the times have got to in the intervening 140 years, one would suspect that clarity would be even further from us. The clarity we seek is generally externalised, about the world and its workings; that which is most hidden is about our personal histories and our families’ intergenerational legacies. Nightshade Mother is the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis’s quest for clarity – a memoir of excavation positioned between what the infant experienced and what the adult has sought to understand.

Multiple narratives are in play: the voice of the child, the poet, the scientist and the psychologist. Lewis is adept at all these stratagems. ‘You were always so bright,’ her mother Eryl tells her accusingly, as though to lay with the child the fault of their mother-daughter problems.