It seems that not much has changed in forty years. Women are still following in their mother’s footsteps. Although Friday and Myers both write about women taking on their mother’s ways of being, this is something families do in general.  Yet somehow, the theme of daughters mirroring mothers seems to be more common in literature than sons mirroring fathers.

Lily Myers does not compare herself favourably to her mother, nor does she welcome the mirror she sees. Lorna Goodison’s poem I am Becoming My Mother is more neutral. In fact, reading some of Goodison’s other poems, it’s clear she admired her mother immensely. You don’t need to read much further than the titles to know that, for instance: For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength) or After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down. The latter poem is of course, about her mother’s death and is deeply moving.

I’ve only recently realised how much the theme of mothers and daughters dominates my own writing. It’s probably not surprising: I have three sisters, but no brothers; I have two daughters, but no sons. It is woven through the novel I’m currently working on, and that of another that I’ve put aside for a while until I can work out the plot anomalies. I didn’t plan for these novels to have that theme, it just somehow crept in. Likewise, when I began writing my first novel, Drawings in Sand, I thought it was about a woman overcoming a drink problem. I was halfway through before I realised it was about a woman recognising that she was a product of her past. Just like Nancy Friday’s interviewees, she thought she lived a very different life to her mother – she lives in a different city, has a different job, is a heavy drinking single mother whereas her mother has always lived a conventional life. (Or so it seems.)

This is the moment when Stella realises how similar their lives are: Macklin was somewhere with someone, probably drinking. She had no idea where, with whom, or when he would come home. It must have been like this for her mother, never knowing Dad’s whereabouts or the state he was in. All these years Stella had railed against her mother, and here she was living her life.

At first, as in Lily Myers’s poem, Stella is not too thrilled to realise how similar her life is to her mother’s. Instead of feeling compassion, she dislikes both her mother and herself. It’s very easy to fall into that trap, but if we have mirrored our mothers, they too have mirrored theirs and nobody is to blame. For me, showing this was as important as showing Stella’s route out of the darkness of heavy drinking. In fact, it was integral to her recovery. Forgiveness is not always a popular word in fiction, but it is the only way to break the mirror women so often find themselves trapped within, and so for me it colours almost everything I write.