Book Review: Mothered by Zoje Stage

Zoje Stage’s latest psychological thriller opens on chaos, as a doctor at a psychiatric hospital reads over the dossier of his latest patient:

“I had to do it. She was contagious”–her greeting as she’d opened the door to let the police in. A miasma of decay had wafted out like a poisonous cloud, making the uniformed officers gag. How had she lived with the stench? And why? Most people, if they were going to report their own crime, would do it right after the fact–not wait two weeks while living with the corpse. Her excuse, given days later, was that she’d been terribly ill (too ill to make a phone call?), but the first responders had quoted her as saying, “It wasn’t an emergency. I didn’t want to bother anyone.”

The identity of killer and corpse are left unknown for the bulk of this story, detailing a difficult mother-daughter relationship exacerbated by the close quarters enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic. This is probably not the best thing to read if you’re getting ready for your own mother to come for an extended visit (as I am!), but it does provide an eerily accurate recounting of life during the recent lockdowns. It is also the most honest account of mental deterioration during that period that I’ve read to date.

Grace is a fairly successful hairdresser who bought a house at possibly the worst time ever: right before COVID-19 shut down businesses and forced people into isolation. When her estranged mother Jackie offers to leave Florida and move in with her up in Pittsburgh to help with expenses, Grace is torn. She could definitely use the money, but fears what it would mean for her own personal life. The owner of the salon where she’s spent her entire career has decided to sell the business, forcing Grace to look for work elsewhere and narrowing her social circle. As a result, she spends far too much time online in various questionable pursuits, and worries that having her mother move in with her will cut into her privacy significantly.

This would be bad enough if the women had a good or even decent relationship. But Grace and Jackie haven’t really talked since Grace was a teenager desperate to leave her parental home. Jackie had been a single mom to twin daughters, one of whom had a particularly disabling form of cerebral palsy. While Jackie worked long hours in a nursing home to support her kids, Grace was forced to look after Hope, whose needs only made her more imperious and demanding of her twin. Grace was glad to finally be able to build her own life, free of family demands, as an adult. Jackie’s reemergence threatens to disrupt these carefully nurtured freedoms.

But bills still need to be paid, so Grace figures she’ll take Jackie in on her own terms. At first, their boundaries seem to hold steady. As the days go by though, Grace begins suffering from nightmares that mostly revolve around Hope, even as the stresses of looking for work and trying not to fall ill herself begin to take their toll. Things come to a head when Jackie reveals that the real reason she wanted to move in with Grace is to rehash their shared past. Grace, whose subconscious has already been stirred up enough by Jackie’s presence, is not happy about this at all:

This is bullshit! So many of the nightmares she’d had were a confounding mixture of reality and horror. None of them had been completely true, so why should this one be the exception? Her mother was fucking with her, trying to convince Grace that she was the crazy one. Jackie wanted her to torment herself, to question everything that had happened in the past, and Grace didn’t want to play along.

Their already fragile mother-daughter relationship falters further as the two women discover shameful truths about one another. Forced to be each other’s only company, the women find a shared madness taking hold, culminating in an act of shocking violence. But who wielded the knives, and who was the victim? And what kind of contagion is truly on the killer’s mind?

Mothered is an utterly harrowing novel of family secrets and betrayals. I felt for Jackie, who did her best under the toughest of circumstances, but sympathized mostly with Grace, who was never really allowed to be a kid and who desperately craved the kind of healthy relationship other women got to have with their own mothers. What could so easily have been a tale of redemption and reconciliation turns, in Stage’s masterful hands, into a terrifying novel of suspense as the women’s grip on reality weakens, with death for at least one of them the only sure outcome.