Hot Milk: Deborah Levy

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I have been sleuthing my mother's symptoms for as long as I can remember. If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, is her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim? The mother in Hot Milk, Rose Papastergiadis, is spirited and controlling, and also a loving woman. I’m showing that she can be many contradictory things at the same time: infuriating and endearing. I’m also looking at the way that she uses her illness as a means of control. That’s a very complicated theme because we are looking at a history, not just a story.

Sometimes her mother excoriates her; other times she grabs the boundary between them and tosses it into the sea. “You have good hands,” she declares, as Sofia dutifully gives her a massage. “If only you could cut your hands off and leave them with me while you go to the beach all day.” She’s also prone to making fantastically narcissistic remarks, for those of us who collect them. Hearing about some newborn kittens, she asks, “I take it the mother is in good health after the birth?” (“I noted she had not asked after the babies,” Sofia says.) It’s an absolutely brilliant, subversive and very loving film. I was thinking about the quote from Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. Almódovar explores this in All About My Mother. It means that gender is an aspect of identity that we acquire: we work with or against mainstream cultural interpretations of being female and male. Almódovar asks us, ‘what is an authentic woman, what is an authentic man?’ We know that Sido never cut her daughter’s hair – there are pictures of Colette with long braids past her knees. So when Colette marries her first husband, a scoundrel who gets her to write and then puts his own name to her Claudine books, Colette still has these braids, and she cuts them off. That is the separation, I think, from her mother.Deborah Levy has a story, 'Weeping Machines', in the fourth issue of The White Review. You can buy it here. Hot Milk treads a sweaty, sun-drenched path into the history books. A properly great novel' Romola Garai

Most of us have been through periods when, like Sofia, we cannot silence the punishing, constantly assessing voice in our heads, the one that turns everything that happens, every encounter, every thought, every feeling into a referendum on our lives as a whole. It’s wearing to be perpetually taking your own mental temperature, to be always re-evaluating.To the Lighthouse is one of my favourite of Woolf’s novels. Aristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and you really do see that in To the Lighthouse. Aristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the infamously fraught relationship between mother and daughter. Here, the novelist, playwright and poet Deborah Levy chooses five books – or rather, four books and one film – that explore motherhood. De Beauvoir knew that a life without love was a waste of time. Her enduring love for Sartre seems to have been contingent on her living in hotels and not making a home with him, which in the 1950s was more radical than I believe even she realised. She remained committed to Sartre being the essential love of her life for 51 years, despite their other attachments. She knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more lovable to him. She was appalled by middle age, in ways I did not completely understand. All the same, as she had written to the writer Nelson Algren, in the flush of their new love: “I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and have loneliness, to work much and write good books and to travel and enjoy myself ... ” The film was also in my mind as I was writing Hot Milk. It was in the mix with Colette’s flowering garden in Burgundy – nature and nurture, insects and animals; it was in the mix with The Lover and the sad, harsh mother, who just seems to have no joy at all in her. Then there is Sontag who has really gazed at her mother, tried to figure out what’s going on, and talks about making herself smaller. And with To The Lighthouse we return to self-sacrificing, patient, creative – actually, enormously creative – Mrs Ramsay, who is also very controlling. I was also extending some of the themes that I gave an airing to in Things I Don’t Want to Know, namely that ‘The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother.’