In Emma Darragh’s debut novel, we meet three generations of women grappling with the effects of motherly abandonment. Two of these women leave their husbands and their children, though we never entirely understand why. Maryanne, worn down from raising two kids, keeping house and being the relied-upon sibling of her own family, walks out after a fight with her daughter Vivian, whose resentment is palpable. “She waited until we were at school and she snuck away without saying goodbye,” Vivian tells her sister Susan. “[She’s] meant to be an adult.”
But years later, after a string of casual jobs and sexual partners, Vivian finds herself with a demanding baby and a distant and unsupportive spouse. Eventually, she too walks out on her daughter, Evie, who finds this abandonment deeply upsetting.
Precarious relationships between mothers and daughters have been well explored in literature; writers including Amy Tan, Alice Pung, Kylie Ladd and Monica Ali have detailed the complexities of this bond and the weight of a mother’s demands on a daughter’s sense of self. But in Darragh’s novel – the first fiction release from Nakkiah Lui’s imprint, Joan – these women’s stories are told so matter-of-factly and with so little drama that it becomes difficult to truly understand their motivation for doing something as drastic as leaving their children, beyond a sense of intergenerational trauma at play.
Through a series of vignettes that unfold in a non-linear narrative, we get glimpses of possible reasons: the days these women spend washing uniforms, cleaning carpets and making dinners; the glossed over, under-appreciated micro-experiences of wifedom and motherhood. This is where Darragh does her best work. She doesn’t censor the realities of child-bearing or child-rearing, vividly describing the “shock of a mother’s naked body” with “large, flattened breasts that hang like udders” and the “bag of skin” around her waist. Both Maryanne and Vivian arrive at a point where even they fail to recognise who they were before motherhood – save for, in Maryanne’s case, a pair of cowboy boots in a wardrobe that remind her of a time when she used to be someone and not only someone’s mother. But it’s difficult to find a justification for the characters’ actions.
That doesn’t mean we don’t like them. Darragh’s women are well-written and relatable, working-class people struggling with familial expectations, patriarchy and personal tragedies. They use sex, substances and crossword puzzles as coping mechanisms for the monotony of their lives, their lack of direction. But neither Vivian or Maryanne are better off after leaving their kids, missing out on the full lives people might imagine they had left their children for. There are no celebrations of freedom, or reclamations of years lost. Maryanne writes “sad songs that sound happy” and Vivian, “like a charged battery”, assaults someone raising funds in a shopping mall, minutes after her card is declined in a supermarket.
Though they never meet again, Maryanne doesn’t stop thinking of Vivian; she swaps her regular shopping centre, hoping to catch glimpses of her. Vivian, too, does not stop loving Evie, stretching her few dollars to buy her snacks she’ll love. She once felt “as though she [was] missing a limb without Evie in her arms”; now she is nostalgic for her. But Evie struggles to fit into her mother’s solo life and sometimes feels that she needs to be “the boss”.
Darragh has a flair for tiny mundane details: trips to long-gone stores like Equip or Red Earth took me back to my teen years; bus routes in the suburbs took me through Wollongong, too. But while she can bring raw, unfiltered experiences to life in entertaining and well-drawn vignettes, some parts of this novel feel underdeveloped. A young Maryanne’s letters to a missing Beaumont child, for example, lack context and relevance; a cousin shoving his hands down Vivian’s underpants doesn’t feel connected enough to the central narrative to lend it a greater meaning.
The themes of Thanks for Having Me should hold universal appeal to anyone who has mothered or been mothered, and it has a refreshing, unflinching approach to a taboo subject. It is an attempt to tell a bold and worthy story – but it gets too distracted by the sum of its parts to truly stick the landing.
Thanks for Having Me by Emma Darragh is published by Joan ($32.99)
