The School for Good Mothers (Chan)

[cahn]

seekingferret read this and I had previously kept bumping into it at the library on the "New Books" shelf, so here we are.

At the beginning of the book, Frida, an incredibly sleep-deprived, divorced mom, leaves her one-year-old child Harriet at home, unattended, while she goes to Starbucks and what was supposed to be a short stop at work but which balloons into two and a half hours; her neighbors report the abandoned Harriet to the police. As a result, she's sentenced to go to a governmental "School for Good Mothers" for a year if she wants custody of her child back.

Me: I'm gonna be judgmental about this, you're supposed to take your kid with you!
My brain: cahn, hey, remember when E was first born and you were in a haze of miserable sleep deprivation and everything was incredibly difficult and you HAD a supportive spouse and also your mom and your mother-in-law helping out?
Me: Well --
My brain: Remember how you had no idea how single mothers did it and they should all get medals?
Me: Yes --
My brain: Remember that? And how you suddenly understood how sleep-deprived hormone-crazy mothers could do horrible things because... even though you didn't and weren't seriously tempted to, you weren't all that far from it yourself even with all that support: close enough that you could totally see how it would happen?
My brain: And hey, while I'm at it, also remember how when E and A were toddlers how you couldn't even go to the bathroom without them following you around and how crazy-making it was, and how relieved you were that you could go to work?
Me: Look, brain, you know and I know that I'm being judgmental here as a defense mechanism, because it was awfully miserable and also I don't want to think about how in that kind of situation I might do that too.
My brain: OK, cool. Just so we're all clear on that.

The book is very interested in is the judgements and societal expectations about what makes a good mother, and how reasonable those might or might not be. Everyone in the book is constantly judging everyone else's parenting -- this is most obvious in the explicitly judgmental way the government and the school explicitly evaluate Frida and the other inmates, but also in the way Frida and the other characters judge both their own and everyone else's parenting, including Frida's judgments of how her husband's new wife Susanna parents Harriet, and Susanna's judgments of how Frida parents.

(I don't think it was a coincidence that Chan used an inciting incident for Frida that was something that people, including myself, are likely to be judgmental about!)

Also, there is a sort of cool precision about the way Chan, with a completely straight face, absolutely skewers using techniques for short-term governmental metric-improvement that you are absolutely not supposed to use in good parenting (or pedagogy, but of course it's the parenting lens that's important here; but you could absolutely imagine that there's probably a parallel School for Good Teachers going on somewhere in the background...). At the School, they use punishments and rewards a lot (and inconsistently at that!), they use shame, they use zero-sum competition between the mothers as to who is the "best," only rewarding the "best" one. (I may have gasped aloud when they did that.)

I really wondered how Chan was going to end the book -- and once I read the ending, I must say that it ended the way I now see it had to inevitably end. Gosh.

I can't say I recommend this book; seekingferret said in his review that "this is one of those really good books that I am hesitant to recommend anyone read because it is so harrowing" and, well, yeah. Same. But if you like dystopian examination of parenting and judgment and the racial/cultural components of same and the systematic destruction that this kind of judgment brings about (I like that sort of thing) this is rather compelling. (I will say that also basically everyone is pretty unlikeable, as you might expect from a book that is about all the ways mothers judge other mothers. I still got through it because it was so compelling, but I could see it being a dealbreaker for others.)

Comments

[seekingferret]

It's so good because Chan definitely has you judging them all as parents and then you're like, but surely people deserve some grace to make mistakes and it's so hard to figure out what's right. But also the school is definitely wrong. And the way you keep going, okay, this school was abusive before but... they managed to make it worse. Again.

I also find it very funny that my review warning people off it got two people to read the book, but I'm glad you appreciated it.

[cahn]

Oh whoops, apparently thinking about replying isn't the same as actually writing a reply, who knew :P

But yessss to all this, like, it really does get one to examine judgments and when they're useful and not useful, and all the ways in which they're not useful!

Hee, honestly I wouldn't have read it if the library hadn't had it prominently on the New Books shelf where it kept getting my attention, and I'm kind of a sucker for school books of any sort. But it's also true that sometimes I'll read reviews that are like "this book is great but also I don't recommend it because it's so brutal!" and my brain kind of stops at the first clause, because I often am OK with brutal in a good cause (as here) :)