Beginning with my very first published short story—written long before I’d had children of my own—my work has often endeavored to explore the complexities of motherhood. This is, in part, because of the significant challenges of my own upbringing. As a result, I’ve always felt a bit on the outside of the experience. All those encouraging one-liners about motherhood—Don’t worry, you’ll love them more than you thought possible! Don’t worry, everyone has maternal instincts!—never really resonated with me. That said, standing on the outside of something can also make it easier to see the forest through the trees. What I can say for sure is that motherhood is not only incredibly complicated, but these challenges manifest in as many different ways as there are women and children.
And being a mother to a daughter can be even trickier, especially as she nears adulthood. On the one hand, you can relate to first loves and first jobs and friendship problems, to trying to figure out who you are. On the other hand, you can relate too much. After all, you remember being her as a teenager and so you want to protect her, spare her your heartbreak, share with her all the things you wish you’d known. But also, she isn’t you, is she? And really no one can protect anyone fully from the realities of life.
When my new novel Like Mother, Like Daughter opens, Katrina has gone missing and her estranged daughter Cleo is thrust into a frantic search to find her. Like Mother, Like Daughter is told from the alternating perspectives of Cleo and her mother in the days before and after Kat’s disappearance. And so, it’s a mystery about what’s happened to Kat and why, but it’s also a love story about a mother and daughter trying to find their way back to each other before it’s too late.
I’ve found that the fraught push-pull of the complicated mother-daughter dynamic—one in which no one is really right and everyone is sometimes wrong—provides excellent fodder for mysteries. I am not alone. Here are some of my favorite suspense novels about charged mother-daughter relationships.
The Push by Ashley Audrain
Blythe Connor is a first-time mother who never had much of a mother of her own. Violet, her newborn baby girl, is acting strangely, isn’t she? Or is Blythe just sleep-deprived, imagining things, hallucinating, going crazy? Blythe’s husband Fox thinks Blythe’s lack of maternal instinct is to blame, but when they have a second child, a son named Sam, Blythe connects with him instantly. After Sam is killed in what appears to be an accident, Blythe can’t let go of the suspicion that Violet is to blame. Suspenseful and beautiful written, The Push is a stunner.
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Camille Preaker is a hard-drinking big-city reporter who is less than thrilled to be back in her small hometown, investigating the disappearance of a second young girl. She’s also moved back into her childhood home with her eccentric heiress mother Adora and her doll-like teenage half-sister Amma. Camille, who’s never recovered from the traumatic death of her younger sister years before, begins to spiral into self-harm when she stumbles upon the missing girl’s body, propped up on a downtown street, without any of her teeth. Few mysteries are as intriguing or mother-daughter bonds as toxic as in Sharp Objects.
Gone Tonight by Sarah Pekkanen
Ruth Sterling and her daughter Catherine seem to have an envious mother-daughter relationship, one of loyalty and protection. But as Catherine advances in her career as a nurse, and prepares to leave the house for a prestigious hospital in another city, Ruth finds that she cannot let go. A diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s leads to a tense cat-and-mouse game and a shocking unraveling of everything Catherine believed to be true about her devoted single mother. A brilliant, dual point-of-view look at the costs of intergenerational trauma.
Pieces of Her by Karin Slaughter
Andrea Oliver’s birthday doesn’t quite go as planned. After a man opens fire in a diner, it’s Andy’s mother Laura who successfully, and violently, intervenes. A clip of Laura dealing the final (professional) blow goes viral, compromising Laura’s cover and drawing some dodgy characters to the small beach town of Belle Isle. As Andy begins to frantically piece together her mother’s past, she is left with one looming question: who is this dangerous woman, her mother? A heart-pounding look at the costs of one mother’s secrets and the high price of the truth.
You Know What You Did by K.T. Nguyen
All is going well in the life of Annie Shaw, an artist who’s transcended her humble beginnings with a successful career and happy family. But then one night her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam War, dies. In her grief Annie is crippled by a resurgence of her childhood OCD. When she wakes up in a strange place, naked, beside a dead body, Annie’s splintered mind cannot piece together what’s happened. All she knows for certain is that she is prepared to do absolutely anything to protect her own daughter. A moving, thoughtful, and suspenseful portrait of parenting amid the complexities of one’s own challenging history.
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