If you’ve read Zailckas’ first book, the non-fiction title Smashed, an exploration exploring the author’s lost, drunken, teen years, it might not come as a surprise that the characters in her first novel Mother, Mother, are so incredibly, indelibly fucked up. The story follows, from varying third-person perspectives, the unstable saga of the Hurst family. Composed of intensely vindictive, narcissistic matriarch Josephine; her distant husband Douglas; autistic son Will and moderately suicidal daughter Violet, the family struggles to come to terms with missing eldest daughter Rose. After Violet is committed to the local psych ward for allegedly attacking Will, the family is turned inside out in a search for the truth about Rose, revealing the dark black core of Josephine, who has been pulling the marionette strings of her family for far too long. A haunting, thrilling novel, Mother, Mother will drag you into the depths of domestic hell.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2014.