Unbecoming
Summary:
Katie had always thought her grandmother Mary was dead, but suddenly she appears in her life. Katie’s mother, Caroline, has a complicated and difficult relationship with her mother Mary and does not want to take her into their home, but there is nowhere else for Mary to go. Secrets across all three generations of women, grandmother, mother, and daughter, soon start to come out. Katie’s own private life is complicated as she deals with her best friend Esme’s rejection and her deepening feelings for girls. Katie starts to develop a relationship with her grandmother, made more complicated by her deteriorating relationship with her own mother Caroline. Katie begins to write down her grandmother’s stories, and through their daily ritual of visiting the same café with her grandmother, and talking to Simona, a girl from her school that works at the café, Katie soon realises she is finding her own voice too.
Edited by: Dublin City University
Comment:
This intergenerational story of three women explores the difficulties that women face over the years, the discrimination and fear they experience based on expressions of their sexuality that society deems inappropriate. The novel moves between Katie’s perspective and Mary’s, distanced by the third-person narration, and in the case of Mary, her worsening dementia. It explores emotional trauma within families and carried throughout generations, the desire of each of the women to be part of what is deemed ‘ordinary’, and the fact that fraught family relationships often come without neat resolutions. Central to the novel is Katie’s own coming-of-age, of ‘becoming’ herself, of finding her own voice through the act of gathering her grandmother’s stories whilst grappling with all of the hurt in these women’s lives that cannot be undone.