Harriet Alida Lye’s new novel, Mother Clown, begins with tragedy. Catherine, one of the two central characters, wakes up one morning to find her husband has died in his sleep. Her daughter, Elise, carries the grief to Paris, where she’s been accepted into a prestigious theatre school with an emphasis on clowning.
The novel paints a portrait of the complexity of mother-daughter bonds, and follows the two women as they reinvent themselves after Catherine takes it upon herself to impulsively follow Elise to Paris.
How a workshop in Montreal helped channel my inner clown
Lye spoke with The Globe and Mail about motherhood, narcissism and storytelling before the book’s release on June 2.
There is an element of performance to the role of mother and daughter, and neither Elise nor Catherine are nailing it. Are there mother or daughter archetypes you were drawn to in writing Mother Clown?
Author Harriet Alida LyeShelby Fenlon/The Globe and Mail
I agree with you that neither of them is nailing it. That’s what I was interested in exploring. In my first draft, a few readers really didn’t like the mother character. That provoked a huge and ultimately very generative revision.
I felt that if you don’t like Catherine, then you just don’t know her. I wanted her to be lovable and flawed, like everyone. I was trying to break that archetype of the self-absorbed mother, but I wasn’t consciously thinking of archetypes when I was first working on it.
Elise has this special relationship with her father, Seb, and there’s a kind of almost envy Catherine experiences. It struck me as a nod to Freud’s Electra complex.
Yes. But I guess I’m too close to Elise to see her in an archetypical way.
So she’s a daddy’s girl, but in a chill way?
Yes! Also, she doesn’t feel dutiful, right? When her mother shows up, she does not feel obligated to care for her and feels really encroached upon. I totally see that those allegiances can be quite classical, as with Oedipus and Electra. But I think that because Seb is always off-camera, there’s also a nostalgia there. Everything will feel softer and more diluted with grief.
Catherine, in her youth, had promise as an artist. There is a sense that Catherine and Elise have this shared story, that Catherine gave that up to be a mother, but as Mother Clown progresses you complicate that idea. It’s a story women are often told – that you can’t be an artist with the proverbial pram in the hall.
I think that’s what Catherine felt, and one of the big epiphanies she realizes is that wasn’t true. Becoming a mother wasn’t what was holding her back.
I don’t want to introduce spoilers, but we see how a formative relationship in her youth may have introduced some – I’m hesitant to use to the word trauma – but it was something that changed her sense of self and more than just becoming a mother. But of course the change informed the way she mothered. Those two things became so embedded that it was impossible for her to disentangle.
It was important for me to show that wasn’t the case for her, because it’s not been the case for me. And I don’t believe it, the idea that a mother can’t be an artist.
In infancy, one doesn’t understand that they have a separate body from their mother. The process of understanding that separation is gradual, for both the baby and the mom. We see in Catherine these moments where she still feels that connection and then in Elise’s performance that comes out as well. That process must involve a degree of narcissism – Elise as an adult woman trying to break out into her own life, no?
Narcissism is really an interesting concept. I’m reading Elizabeth Strout right now. I love her story Motherless Child, where a woman named Olive overhears her son talking to his wife about the fact that his mother is a narcissist. Because the perspective is close [third-person] with Olive, we know that she’s not a narcissist and she has insight and she has empathy and it’s fear holding her back from the connection.
I think that was what I was trying to explore as well. Catherine is held back not by narcissism, as her daughter thinks, but by a fear of closeness and a fear of what could happen if she tries and fails both in motherhood and in art.
There are a few instances of people reminding Elise that her mother is, in fact, a person. And we have Catherine’s best friend reminding her that Elise has her own story, even about things that happened to Catherine. Given the way that events and understandings can shape a family, how do we determine ownership over the story?
I was thinking about this question so much while writing: At what point do we pass over the baton? And can there ever be two people holding the baton?
When I was writing my memoir, I had this strong feeling, which I talk about in that book, that my cancer was the most defining feature of my life. It was the story I had to tell, and it was the story that I thought about all the time.
Once I became pregnant and was about to have my first child, I felt like I could finally pass that on. It no longer was the defining feature of my life. And that was a huge relief. So that’s interesting to think about too – how it can be a big relief to let go of that identity and ego.
This interview has been edited and condensed.