The Push
The Push
By: Ashley Audrain
[Fulfilling ‘Best Debut Novel’ category of the 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards Reading Challenge]
“A mother’s heart breaks a million ways in her lifetime.”
Fellow author, Kristin Hannah, describes Audrain’s book as “Raw, visceral, and often disturbing” and “an intense psychological drama.” Another blurb describes it as a complex, unsettling and unflinching portrayal of motherhood.
I agree with both of these observations.
I’m assuming the target audience is generally women. I would think this book might be uncomfortable for most men to read. It is rather graphic in terms of describing the experience of childbirth and just being a mother. I related to a lot of it but it’s definitely told in a ‘raw’ manner.
I would think even for women who have not undergone childbirth and nursing may find the transparent descriptions and feelings to be a little shocking or intense.
[Also, a note here that the f-word is used moderately. Mostly to describe sex. Why people use this crass and emotionally detached word for this action is lost on me. I suppose in the context of this particular story it shows the loss of intimacy in her marriage, yet as a reader, I’d rather not have to encounter that word.]
It’s fitting for Kristin Hannah’s blurb to be included on the back of this book. I just finished her book, The Four Winds. Though hers is the historical fiction genre rather than psychological thriller, both deal with the bond of a mother and a daughter.
In Hannah’s book we see the distance between mother and daughter, lack of affection, and a teenage hatred, yet their relationship evolves as they endure hardship together and are forced to the edge of survival.
Audrain’s story is more sinister. The distance between mother (Blythe) and daughter (Violet) is mutual and begins from Violet’s birth. Detachment. Coldness. Manipulation. What does a mother do when she believes the worst about her daughter, when she believes there is something dark at work in Violet? And what happens when her husband doesn’t believe her?
The story begins with Blythe staring at her husband and daughter celebrating Christmas with another woman and young boy. A new family. Beside her sits a pile of papers detailing for her husband ‘her side of the story.’ She has come to deliver it.
The relationships at play are mysterious and awkward. How did these people get to where they are?
The rest of the book is the content of those pages, directed to ‘You’ (her husband) and describing her innermost thoughts about her motherhood, her daughter, her marriage, the ‘tragedy,’ and her history.
The most interesting part of this book for me was the context she provided as a prologue: "All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother.” Therefore a granddaughter spends five months in the womb of her grandmother.
To the context of this book, Audrain takes this scenario of an egg in the ovary of the fetus in the mother, ‘vibrating to the rhythms’ of her mother and grandmother’s blood, and poses- ‘What if the grandmother is a bad mother, and the mother is a bad mother? Is this generational familial dysfunction at work on the egg in that five-month-span?
Is Blythe cut from the same cloth as the women before her? Can we trust her version of motherhood, of her relationship with her daughter, of her truth?
It’s an interesting thing to explore in a psychological thriller such as this. It creates a suspense and mystery as we slowly learn more of the story. I admit I was constantly questioning whether this was a Gone Girl situation of unreliable narrator. It seemed to be playing toward that.
But I won’t tell you if it was or not!
Overall, I don’t know if this book deserves its nomination. I think it’s just a personal preference thing because a lot of people liked it.
[This was also nominated in the Best Mystery/Thriller category, but I think The Good Sister, which was also nominated was a better psychological thriller.]
The writing style of first-person narrative directed to her husband the whole time was a little annoying to me for the entire book. I didn’t feel like I really even had a picture of who her husband was or even who she was- at least appearance-wise. There was a lot of the book that felt blurred visually.
The language and ‘rawness’ also wasn’t my preference.
I liked the eerie slow-burn mystery aspect, but there are better versions of this (like The Silent Patient.)
I liked the exploration of the struggles of motherhood, but at the same time, as a mother of two daughters and two sons, it was a bit terrifying! There are some mother/child scenarios that my brain can’t handle. (Ahem, Sam.)
I don’t think this book is for everyone but if you like sinister, dysfunctional dramas and are unfazed by some descriptions about blood and stitching and afterbirth, then this might keep you affably engaged.
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