We are lying on a mattress in the garden, the long grass tickling our bare toes, the mountain sun warming our backs. Ahead of us, up on a deodar tree, a glossy blue-black Himalayan crow perches, its raucous call a familiar interruption in the stillness of the afternoon.
“Give me a book like Mother Mary Comes to Me. I want something that’s well written. Or like the book you gave me before my trip to China—Once Upon a Time in the East,” she says.
Both these are mother-daughter books : Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is the most powerful mother daughter book I have ever read, a book so searing, so exquisitely written, it’s unforgettable. And Once Upon a Time in The East by Xiaolu Guo Guo is as powerful in a different way, as Guo tells her story of being the child of a mother who was a Red Guard in China’s Cultural Revolution.
Mother-daughter books is a genre I have been obsessed with this past year, a genre which seems to be everywhere. I’m Glad My Mother Died, says McCurdy in her memoir of being a child actor pressured by her mother. In How to Lose Your Mother, Molly Jong writes about caring for her famous mother Erica Jong, while she has dementia; she also pours out the agonies of her childhood, of being alternately abandoned by her mother or being featured in her writing as a fat and unadmired child. Both books are raw and honest, and I understood the rage in them. But I kept wanting more complexity, more wondering, more of the mother’s side of things.
Enough with these mother-daughter books, I think. I’ve read more than my share—all these memoirs and novels like The Far Field and Burnt Sugar. And yet I am no closer to cracking the complexities of the mother-daughter code; I still don’t have the secret recipe for a blissfully happy equation with my own mother.
Beside me, the September baby stretches her arms above her head and says nothing, waiting.
I think about my recent reads. What about this memoir by a woman who worked in Amazon—Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter?
My daughter shakes her head. She enjoys learning about the tech world, she loved Careless People, the Facebook expose memoir. But a year of business school, a year of discussing possible careers; she wants something different today.
We stretch our legs and consider. Then a crescendo of barks rends the air. The wild dogs outside the house are converging on a small white dog—a stranger to the pack. Snarls and barks and yelps. Bisi bounds up the rock to see what is happening. Her nose quivers, her ears stand up. She is safe inside, but only just. Someone, perhaps it is the man at the dhaba on the corner of the road, yells and throws water at the pack and they disperse.
And now there is silence and we wait for it to settle as we return to the matter of which book to read.
Something well-written but away from the office, narrative nonfiction, the racy kind she likes?
London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe? The true-life story of a British boy who pretended to be the son of a Russian oligarch and plunged to his death in the Thames?
She frowns, scrunching up her face in thought. She’s loved this author’s earlier book, his exposé on the OxyContin scandal in America and the Sackler family in Empire of Pain. But not today — she’s spent a year tracking markets and corporate failures. She wants out of that world for a bit. It’s summertime and she’s just travelled across half the world to get here. She’s tired; she wants a book that will engage her instantly, transport her to a make-believe world.
Time then for me to pull out the big guns—my murder mysteries. I save them for when I’m in desperate need of disappearing into a book. For being instantly plunged into a puzzle—into a world where something is definitely not right, where a person has been killed.
The book lets you play detective, joining the side of those who restore the order. You begin to instantly evaluate the suspects, trying to figure out: who is who? Is a character lying or telling the truth? And then slowly all the bits of the puzzle fall into place, the murderer is caught, justice is served. What could be more satisfying?
“Try Tana French,” I say, handing her my spare Kindle.
It’s chilly suddenly and I look up at the sky where clouds are beginning to build and bank up over the hillside. If the breeze doesn’t blow them away, today will turn into a dank, drippy day—time to pack up our mattress on the grass and retreat indoors. But Tana French works even then.
I love Tana French’s murder mysteries for their sense of the Irish countryside, for the way the landscape becomes a character in itself as it slowly alters the moods of the world of the murder investigation. Then there’s the psychological deep dive into the minds of the detectives, for the deep strategy of the way the detectives interrogate different witnesses. I’ve read most, but saved a few for just a day like this.
And then it’s sunny again, the clouds driven away by the breeze. The stillness returns, the sun is back for now , but the air feels more alert. It is the perfect mood for a mystery. And now the September baby and I, we are spending this Mother’s Day weekend on a reading binge of Tana French’s murder mysteries.
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and Founder, Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. For all questions about life and literature email sonyasbookbox@gmail.com.)
