Where I End

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The scenario, though, gifts us with this zinger: "How do you explain to your dad - who still laments the end of Teletext - what being humiliated live on the internet even means?" Meanwhile Aoileann's father lives on the mainland and visits once a month and while he is aware of his wife's condition Aoileann and her grandmother put on a show that they take better care of her:

White’s novel is set on an island in Galway Bay that bears a strong geographical resemblance to Inis Meáin in the Aran Islands. In an appendix she goes to some length to say that it is not the island, but a version of it, as if from a parallel universe.This morning, I’m wondering what the link is between these books and my reading experiences? Quite simply, everything hinges on the writing. I have, in the past, abandoned books due to the writer’s heavy reliance on gratuitous violence or downright grossness. Life’s just too short. What stands out for me in Where I End is the impressive, engaging writing, superb scene setting, clearly defined characters, and Sophie’s own unique style. The actual footprint this story occupies is quite finely focussed, however the narrative surrounding the physical appearance and ‘feeling’ of specific locations is wonderfully descriptive, creating excellent enhanced visual awareness, for any confirmed ‘armchair travellers’ who are brave enough to visit. First is the monotony of Aoileann's existence and the unrelenting drudgery and normative horror that is her everyday. She has never known different. Her days consist of performing the act of caring for her "bed-thing" mother. She doesn't live, so much as she exists. Her life is a repetition of these uncaring acts of caring for the bed-thing that birthed her. Aoileann and Móraí no longer see Aoibh as human, but as a thing, a chore, a horror.

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. The book is brilliantly paced, superbly tense (think Sleeping With the Enemy-tense) and the tale unspools to reach a terrifying climax. I was gripped at the beginning, filled with a sense of foreboding in the middle and rigid with fear for the last part. Holy smoke. Admirable to be able to evoke such feelings of terror in a reader. Wow. 4/5 ⭐️ It’s funny because I do think when women write about their lives, people worry about their children.” (White and her husband Seb have three young sons, Roo, Ari and Sonny). “I don’t know if they worry about the children of male writers. But I do think it’s just always more transgressive, or more taboo, for a mother to write honestly about motherhood and her experiences.”The house in which Aoileann is at the furthest, least accessible, part of the island and its windows have been boarded up with stones. Aoileann lives with her paternal grandmother, an islander, who she calls Móraí, and her mother, originally from the mainland. But no-one on the island knows that her mother is there, believing her to have died around the time Aoileann was born, and she is bed-bound and dumb, seemingly in some form of permanent post-natal depression, and is treated by Aoileann and Móraí as little more than an animal, or perhaps, even worse an object.

Three generations of women live together on a remote island. Nineteen-year-old Aoileann is friendless and unschooled: “My body grew but my mind stayed small.” She despises the “cowed and crumbling” islanders, who believe she is cursed. Given what is revealed about her history, this attitude seems implausible until it becomes clear that the island, while geographically similar to Inis Meáin, is more like The Upside Down in Stranger Things: a malevolent inversion, run on suspicion and distrust. White is incisive on how the Internet trades on women and body image, and how this has shifted in recent years, writing, "The fact was, ‘hotness ’wasn’t just a ‘state of mind’, as they’d endlessly proclaimed on the podcast. It took work."

Aoileann’s every word, thought and deed, oozed hatred and malignant, malevolent intent. However, this was beautifully balanced and nuanced against some barely discernible and well disguised moments of loss and longing, as she searched for that illusive something she knew she had lost, or maybe never had, knowing it had left her damaged and somehow incomplete, whilst at the same time her awakening femininity saw her trying to disseminate and come to terms with her own sexuality. You don’t have to be doing your needlepoint but parlaying it into an Etsy shop or something like that. I feel we don’t say enough that it’s very good to be very sh*t at your hobby … I’m in a skate group called the Huns of Anarchy and they’re amazing. Some of them are just so spectacular, dancing and doing all the moves and stuff. And I’m fairly happy with the level I’ve achieved. I don’t think I’ll ever be a better skater than I am now.” When the first line of a novel starts ‘ My mother. At night, my mother creaks’, you know that this book is certainly going to be nothing like you have read for a while!