Mothers, daughters and loss
Whether it’s Alice Munro (“Lives of Girls and Women), Barbara Gowdy (“Falling Angels”) or Mona Awad (“13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl”), linked short-story collections featuring mother-daughter relationships present maternal love that’s as deep as it is unresolved.
With “Catch My Drift,” Genevieve Scott joins this excellent company of writers with an affecting novel-instories whose comic moments intersect evocatively with moments of loss and regret. As well, there are epiphanies about the give-then-takeaway unpredictability that life can offer.
After a prologue that captures the whirlwind romance between 1976 Olympics hopeful Lorna to big-talker Alex, the story flashes forward to 1988 and a fizzled relationship of long-gestating resentments.
Scott splits her debut book by chronology and narrator. “Wise” for example, is set over Christmas of 1987 and narrated by Cara, Lorna’s preteen daughter; the following chapter, “Anything,” relates Lorna’s attempt in 1988 to carve a place for herself that’s free of regret. “Freedom” takes place in 1995 at a Torontoarea palliative care unit, a building, Cara remarks, “especially designed to make life look grey and miserable.”
A single mom, more or less, Lorna is an office worker striving to guarantee order and leadership at home while struggling with growing loneliness or telling her kids “Moving is an adventure” with optimism in her voice.
Cara, who in her mother’s eye craves normalcy and the security of fitting in, faces her own set of challenges. She also changes personalities like clothing. Assigned to the “retard room” in Grade 5, a year later she’s in a band called Scam (with irreverent lyrics such as “Pregnant again and just turned 10”). Still later she has an eccentric friend with whom she plays “messed-up games, like Jewish refugees or runaway teenage strippers.”
Cara’s a delight. And in a novel with patches of true sadness, Scott gives her a bounty of witticisms that, while blackly comic, are laugh-aloud funny.