Where I End

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Aoileann and Móraí, her taciturn grandmother, spend their days secretly tending to “the bed-thing”, Aoileann’s mother, the survivor of a private disaster. Aoileann loathes her mother, a hatred manifest in endless daily cruelties. No matter the situation, White is able to find the ridiculous and absurd in it - from ash-scattering to pregnancy. ‘There’s nothing so sci-fi in life as reproducing’, she says. It’s no wonder that giving birth and parenthood are mined time and again for horror, she observes. Jo Nestor, retired Adult Educator, lives in Leitrim and writes fulltime. Twice long-listed for the FISH memoir competition, she won the Leitrim Guardian Literary Award, 2020. Her writing features in the 2021 edition of the broadsheet, Autumn Leaves, the Leitrim Guardian, and at www.writing.ie She chooses to live in hope. Those we did understand seemed unperturbed by what appears to have been a mass death of 21 people since March of ’31.

It is a novel that encompasses so many things. What it means to be a mother, the mother daughter relationship, duty, desire and anger too. In Aoileann, White has created a character who works so well because we are fascinated as to why she hates her mother, yet still cares for her. We see how Aoileann is desperate to love and be loved, but comes to hate her mother for the life she is forced to live. Dada is softer than we are. He loves the thing somehow. His memories sustain the love and the thing he sees once a month is tidied up by us, neatened for his consumption. Without it in his eyeline constantly, it is easier for him to recast this thing as a tragic ailing wife and mother. He doesn’t have to look at it every day. It doesn’t hover nearby at all times, ruining his life. Móraí works there on its opening. It has an artist-in-residence, Rachel, who arrives with her infant son. Aoileann meets her on the beach and finds a focus for her perverse understanding of love. I see the sea’s gleeful mutilation of the men as inevitable. The island is hostile; the seas murder the men and regurgitate them for us to see and know what’s coming for us all.’ I do think this book may be a hard read for people who are family carers, and therefore I wouldn't recommend it to these people. There are some moments in this that made me so uncomfortable due to the way Aoileann and her grandmother treated her mother - they kept her as comfortable as possible, and cared for her in the way they knew how but there were moments that made you truly wonder if she was trapped in a terrible silent prison of her own self. And as Aoileann's obsession deepens, her behaviour towards her mother becomes more resentful and cruel.This book is that feeling in words. It's visceral. It's stomach churning. It's horrifying. It's dread, and damp, and stale, and fusty. Unfortunately the loss brings on a sort of high-functioning zombification. She becomes alcohol-dependent, spraying perfume around to mask the scent of her drinking. Outwardly she appears to be coping, but ‘at what point does coping become corrosive?’, she wonders. Sophie White: 'The suffering she endured at her lowest ebb

I’ve always found that my children have spurred my creativity so much. I can’t even describe it exactly. But I just feel … the precipice of human experience is that delivery of a child and then witnessing the first moments of life. It’s really awesome, in the true sense of the word. Awe is the feeling I always have. And I think there’s such an urge when I have a young baby to tap into it and document it. I’ve always written through those times.” She and her husband were walking by these cliffs one day when they became “overcome with this pervasive weirdness”.

Aoileann’s mother and grandmother exist as emotionally empty human shells, whilst her father is so consumed by self-loathing, having convinced himself that he is the sole victim of this terrible tragedy, that Aoileann has grown up with only the company of the treacherous thoughts which race around in her own mind. During the early chapters, I found myself musing that there were parallels between this book and The Colony by Audrey Magee, with both set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland and featuring a resident artist character. I think they make good companion reads but do steel yourself for some seriously disturbing content. Aoileann, a 19-year-old girl, spends her days helping her paternal grandmother care for her mother who is bed-bound after an unspoken family tragedy. Unschooled and friendless, Aoileann bathes, feeds and dresses her mother using a series of makeshift hoists, hiding her from the outside world and dressing her up specially for Dada, who visits once a month. The men wanted to think parenthood could be 'won’, while the women were barely able to think beyond whatever symptoms were holding them hostage at any one time", she thinks at one point. When the local wool factory is deemed by the mainlanders as ripe for redevelopment and investment, Aoileann’s grandmother is employed to collate her remembrances of the island, which means she now leaves Aoileann alone with her mother. Aoileann sees this as a way for her to spy on Rachel, to ingratiate herself into her lfe so that she will become indispensible to her, and this where the novel becomes even more unsettling as events spiral and twist in ways you cannot possibly imagine.

Teenager Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her newborn son move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love... In contrast, the bed-bound mother is decrepit and withered. "If she were not so empty, I would be full", Aoileann thinks of her. Between the two, White explores the two extremes of motherhood: creation and destruction. Teenager Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her newborn son move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love. This isn’t work lovingly done, however, as it is clear the pair hate the silent, seemingly immobile mother. They call her "the bed-thing" and "it", and the only time Aoileann calls her "mother" is with a sardonic edge. None of this sounds appealing, yet I could not stop reading. I almost missed a meeting because I needed to see how it ended. On a sentence level, Sophie White has crafted a literary horror story that snakes its way into your brain and will not leave. These characters are fictional, but I desperately want to know how things turned out for them all following the novel’s conclusion. That’s how immersive this book is and how brilliant a writer Sophie White is.

Where I End by Sophie White is likely to be one of the last books I read in 2022, and is certainly the most viscerally powerful and disturbing.