Webs of words

In her new memoir, Nightshade Mother: A disentangling, Gwyneth Lewis, national poet of Wales, recalls writing her first poem at the age of seven. Bored during a wet Easter holiday, she entertained herself by making rain the subject of a Welsh poem that “lands, fully formed on the page”. With great pride she showed it to her mother, Eryl, a teacher of English who expressed her genuine pleasure by correcting Lewis’s inventive spelling and smoothing her grammar. Writing became a collaborative exercise between the two, wherein Lewis could do what she loved most with a companion invested in her improvement. But this collaboration was also a source of misery, exposing a rift between her mother’s tongue and Lewis’s mother tongue. The mother- teacher’s red lines sat over her “oblong stanzas” like a spider’s “indelible web”, cheating the child of her own authority – an example, Lewis believes, of what Alice Miller calls “poisonous pedagogy”, wherein a parent controls and directs a child’s inner world.

Even with a thriving career and loving partner, Lewis continued to experience “‘catastrophic collapses in confidence’” from her mother’s emotional abuse. Nonetheless, she took on the role of dutiful daughter, caring for her parents in their final illnesses, but when she moves back into the family home following her mother’s death, she is plagued by migraines that she considers to be a visceral response to the memories of her mother’s scornful control and her own self-doubt.

Her efforts to “disentangle” the internalized maternal judgement from her own authentic one result in a dual perspective that brings a rare measuredness to a memoir about a coercive parent. Sometimes Lewis’s interpretations of the dynamic are interesting rather than convincing, such as her supposition that Eryl projected onto Lewis her resentment at being sidelined as a child by her older sister. But Lewis regularly asks, “Am I being fair?”, noting that her own sister’s experience of their mother was far more positive. Lewis, too, has warm memories: of Eryl’s baking (a richly iced chocolate sponge cake particularly stands out in her recollections) and the intricate dresses she made for her daughters and their dolls. But these are poisoned by the “deadly nightshade” of her mother’s anger. Eryl seems to transform into a menacing bird with a grey face and widened eyes, and “her lips disappear and, as she works herself up further, her mouth tightens into a circle, wrinkles stitching it into place”.

The aim of Nightshade Mother is not only to describe childhood sufferings, but also to explore the questions that linger in the aftermath: why did Lewis’s “brightness” so offend her mother? Why was Eryl intent on silencing her? (Her final words to Lewis were “Shut up”.) How can Lewis rebuild self-belief? Above all, she asks, as she hears Eryl’s cutting anger emerge in her own voice, how can she avoid becoming like her mother? Lewis’s persistence in naming, taming and understanding her mother’s worst features makes Nightshade Mother an original and valuable exploration of a tragically mismatched mother and daughter.

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