Category Gwendoline Riley

As the film of Deborah Levy’s novel Hot Milk is released, author Abigail Bergstrom explores the literary fascination with inaccessible, emotionally distant maternal figures

‘My love for my mother is like an axe,” the narrator of Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk tells us. “It cuts very deep”. Set in the Spanish coastal city of Almería, the book – which has now been made into a film starring Sex Education’s Emma Mackey – is a sun-drenched unravelling of a daughter tethered to her ailing mother.

Hot Milk fits into a growing canon of literature exploring the absent, or fading, or otherwise inaccessible mother – stories in which the maternal figure is pulled to the edge of the frame, so that the daughter can take centre stage. Books such as Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms and First Love, both featuring mother-daughter relationships marked by emotional distance and strained communication. Or The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, where the protagonist, Leda, is both unseen daughter and deserting mother, a collision that unleashes emotional chaos.

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