Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Gretel Killeen, Hachette Australia, $32.99.
There’s heartache and a perplexing intricacy about My Daughter’s Wedding. It’s also intense and entertaining as it explores the vicissitudes found in three generations of mother-daughter love.
The story follows 50-something Nora Fawn, whose daughter Hope disappeared from her life four years ago, only to keep contact with her older sister Joy. Nora spent years searching in herself to understand why Hope had left. She had once considered mothering the biggest achievement of her life. Nora despairs over her lost relationship with her daughter, but then she also has problems with her own emotionally repressed mother, Daphne.
Then out of the blue Hope rings to say, “I’m coming home, I’m getting married, the wedding is in three weeks and it’s your job to organise it”. Desperate to prove her worth as a mother and regain her daughter’s love, Nora commits to the task – assisted by her own increasingly dementia’d mother and her two best friends, Soula and Thilma.
Nora’s children are the loves of her life. “The land of mother-daughter love is a diverse terrain. Replete with mountains and valleys and quicksand. It’s a land where a strange language is spoken. It is at once a civil war, a financial relationship, a friendship and a romance.”
“And mother love? Well to me I guess it’s like a tube of paint. The paint’s pure inside the tube but the nozzle it flows through can make it blob, and spurt and splatter. And sometimes, if the tube is broken or torn, the paint also squishes out the sides. My love for my daughters is totally pure, but due to my own cracks and flaws it often splurts all over the place.”
This contemporary fiction from author, artist and award-winning comedy writer Gretel Killen is feisty, eccentric and cheerful.
