How mothers are turning to murder and mayhem
There’s a new mother on the block, and she’s not a nice lady. Just as non-fiction writers are exploring the dark side of motherhood, fiction is taking it to extremes.
"If mum bloggers opened up about 5pm wine and skipping bath time, mums in novels are stalkers, murderers and psychopaths," writes bestselling novelist Caroline Corcoran in Grazia. "Of course they are: it’s fiction."
Psycho mothers have been around in literature for a long time.Credit:Gabriele Charotte
Corcoran has a new thriller, The Baby Group, which explores a common example of "mum noir", as publishers call it. This is the friendship group between new mothers, and the trust that can so easily be shattered if some mums have secrets and are not the kind, supportive friends they appear to be.
When she was writing The Baby Group, Corcoran didn’t realise she was part of a trend. Since then, she’s spotted many examples of mum noir books, either out already or scheduled for 2021. She quotes Phoebe Morgan, an editorial director for HarperFiction at HarperCollins in Britain (and herself an author in the genre, with her book The Babysitter): "Lots of authors are highlighting the darker side of motherhood, leading to a spate of gripping suspense novels."
Literary agent Diane Beaumont adds that it’s not surprising these books focus on the difficult early days of motherhood: "It can be a lonely and isolating time with many conflicting feelings."
The popularity of Big Little Lies has had a big impact on crime writing.
Psycho mothers have been around in literature for a long time: think of Medea or Grendel’s mum. But the recent surge might be due to the huge popularity of Australian Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel Big Little Lies, and the subsequent hit TV series. The show transported the setting from Sydney to the California coast but preserved the themes of murder, rape, domestic violence, child bullying and cover-ups that involved all the mothers in the friendship group.
Sarah Vaughan, another bestselling novelist with a new mum noir book, used her own experience of lack of sleep and a constantly screaming colicky newborn to spark Little Disasters. Not that she became a psycho, but she retained that visceral sense of helplessness and what it did to her sense of self.
"Motherhood is an area that’s ripe to be explored in psychological suspense and crime fiction,’’ she writes in Crimereads. ‘‘After all, it begins with blood, pain and terror’’ – and then ricochets violently from joy to panic, self-doubt and extreme exhaustion.
Again, she finds many examples of mum noir books, and identifies four sub-groups of stories — monstrous mothers, a suspect nanny or surrogate, swiftly formed and unnaturally intense maternal friendship groups, and ‘‘interrogating the disordered thinking, and fractured sense of self, the claustrophobia and isolation, that can accompany those early years’’.
Modern motherhood, with its emphasis on perfection, itself engenders this self-doubt, she adds. Often the mothers’ group won’t admit to any problems. Witness Blythe in Ashley Audrain’s forthcoming novel The Push: ‘‘I studied these women closely, trying to find their lies. They never cracked. They never slipped.’’
The danger with these themes is that writers can be accused of sexism or blaming the victim by making the culprit invariably female and maternal, when often fathers or the social set-up should also take a share of the blame. But a writer who is careful to build up the psychology and motives of all her characters can avoid this pitfall while still pushing the narrative into diabolical territory.
Readers can identify with the characters. ‘‘These new mums we are getting to know are human; flawed, not unlike the ones we know in our own lives,’’ writes Caroline Corcoran, ‘‘barring, hopefully, the murdering and the stalking.’’
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