Review by Selma Carvalho
Flash is a form still defining itself; in places it leans to a prose poem, elsewhere pioneer-purists retain the narrative arc of a short story. It’s ringed with symbols, metaphors, the suppleness of language casting whorls of words, the Mughal miniaturist crafting tiny stories about the human condition.
In the thematically unified flash collection, The Almost Mothers (Dahlia Press, 2019), Laura Besley sets a tone of intimacy and immediacy. In ‘The Motherhood Contract’ she writes, ‘You must not tell the mother-to-be that she may not instantly love her child.’ At the heart of being a mother is this paradox: we fall in love with that moulting mass of moth-breath we give birth too, but nothing prepares us for the reality of motherhood—the days without end, the days consumed with isolation, fatigue, and rage. As primary care-givers we wade through the molasses mess of feeding, diapering, sleepless nights and postnatal depression without experience and largely without support. So much of the collection has echoes of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song,’ ‘I am no more your mother than the cloud…’
The content is so achingly familiar to anyone who has done early morning school runs—the condescending, competitive, ridiculous one-upmanship our feral maternal instincts ignite when we meet at the school-gate, is all too obvious in, ‘Getting Ahead,’ ‘Super Mum,’ and ‘Let Love Lead the Way.’ Besley holds a mirror to our peccadilloes, not in a way that is harsh but as someone who recognises the fragile, fragmented condition that is motherhood; the experience of the human heart when first it decides to embrace a love so overwhelming, so all-consuming that everything else blurs into nothingness.
I particularly enjoyed, ‘All the Children,’ for its textural density. It’s a nod to Hemingway's ‘Baby Shoes,’ and works in the same way, using negative space to direct our attention to a mother’s loss and grieving. Here, Besley is at her best, bending the flash fiction form with technical precision, and treading ever so delicately to deliver the denouement.
Another story, technically impressive is, ‘To Cut a Long Story Short,’ told in a single sentence extending over a page. Although, I’m generally not fond of such structural manoeuvring, this works very well; it portrays the sense of never-endingness engulfing mothers in the first few years of parenting as their partners, family and friends carry on oblivious to their predicament. ‘… the baby won’t nap, it starts to rain as soon as you finish hanging the washing out, the baby still won’t nap…’ In ‘2056: A New Generation’ and ‘That Apple’ we meet, perhaps the only person who understands, that high-priestess of parenting, our own mother, in whom we seek comfort and counsel as we belly flop into this whirlpool of emotion and exhaustion.
Two stories that loop together are ‘Breakthrough in Motherhood Programme,’ and placed much later in the book, ‘Not all Linings are Silver.’ These dark dystopian flashes pose an existential question: what is the experience of motherhood? Is it stored in sensory memory, something primal and driven by forces we barely understand, or does it exist outside of ourselves and can it be erased? A shadowy but (recognisable) muscular State seeks to legislate women’s bodies and thereby their choices. ‘What you have to remember, Hunter, is that the government says it’s for their own good.’ This collective will, as always, subjects women—particularly young, vulnerable and disadvantaged women—to the power of the patriarchy. Even where the State acknowledges that women need help, it sees fit to ‘help’ them by erasing their rights and rendering them voiceless.
A woman’s existence still pivots on the expectations society places on her. It’s been 24 years since Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary came out, and little has changed in the intervening years. The high point of a woman’s achievement is still considered to be marriage and motherhood. ‘That Face’ exposes the hollowness of these expectation, particularly when we, women, impose them on each other.
The title story ‘The Almost Mothers,’ I had to read twice, until my eyes fell on the sentence, ‘that kind of letting go is gradual,’ and then, it did what exquisite flash fiction is supposed to do—it all clicked into place.
I can’t wait for Besley’s second collection about motherhood to come out, when the kids are all grown-up, and just like that they’re out of our lives. We look back, and long for that baby smell, once again.
Laura Besley writes short (and very short) fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online (Fictive Dream, Spelk, EllipsisZine) as well as in print (Flash: The International Short Story Magazine) and in various anthologies (Adverbally Challenged, Another Hong Kong, Story Cities).
The Almost Mothers is her first collection and can be purchased here.
The representational image is by Patrick Fore and was downloaded from unsplash.com