My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley

I tried the same tack. I read out the dinner choices as Griff had done. I tried to use her newspaper, too, to talk to her. 'Isn't this dreadful?' I said, about a headline, or 'Do you know who that is?' about a picture of a soap star. I read out a Quick Crossword clue and she tried to answer. Or rather--as in a game of charades--she would communicate that she knew the answer, and then it was down to me to make suggestions, and for her to shake her head and frown, or nod and urge me on, until I guessed it right. If she let me know that she was drawing a blank then it was me who did the mimes and the gurning, until she said 'Oh! Oh!' to let me know she'd got it. There were some words she could say. She said 'yellow' for lemon and 'big doors' for wardrobe. She couldn't manage more than three or four words at a time.

Bridget and her mother Helen--Hen--have a relationship at arms' length. They see each other once a year, on Helen's birthday, going to the same ratty tavern, and though Hen seems to resent that she is not more included in her daughter's life, any attempt at change in a way that might bring them closer leads to more misunderstanding, more resentment. As Bridget's boyfriend John observes--when Hen finally meets him after years and years--Bridget's mother seems to have a preconceived notion about how any interaction ought to go, and the way it actually goes fails to reach her perception. In the meantime, she is desperately lonely, throwing herself into clubs and cruises and activities, searching for a man who will could become her third husband, but without the capacity for change or accommodation that such love would require.

My Phantoms is a book that's so small in conception, so confined to the everyday miseries of mothering and daughtering that you find yourself wondering if, despite the protagonist not sharing a name with author Gwendoline Riley, you're reading some of that autofiction you keep hearing is everywhere these days. But what it does, it does well: Riley captures exactly the feelings of stagnation and standoffishness that characterize only familial relationships. The way in which the need for change is glaringly obvious, but the person in front of you is too familiar for either of you to change--you know each other too well, which is why you don't know each other at all. At times I found it a little too small, feeling that, even though Hen is quite specifically evoked and alive-seeming, the familiarity of the narrative made it an odd subject for a novel.

In the novel's final movement, Hen develops a brain tumor. (This does provide a little melodrama, but then again, that's an ordinary kind of story, too: such medical ends are awaiting all of us.) In her diminished form, unable to speak coherently, Hen is not so different than she always was. What's different is that the possibility of change, of drawing closer or resolving the small barriers of family bitterness, has been precluded. Hen, spoiler alert, dies, but in a way her death is prefigured by the death of these possibilities. In the end, Bridget understands her mother, pities her, but never reaches her.