Mothers & Daughters

I am very close with my mom, and always have been. There have, however, been bumps in the road of our relationship. One of the bumpiest was after my senior year of high school when she sent me, against my will, on a wilderness adventure.

I’d been a solid B+ student throughout school, but halfway through my final year she decided I was underachieving (true) and that there was nothing stopping me from graduating with straight As (not true). More than half our marks for the year were already accounted for, so that meant I had to raise my marks to the stratosphere in order for it them to average out to what she wanted.

And so, of course, I found myself, that summer, in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, on a trip I had never wanted to go on. To be fair, both my brothers had done this program and thought it was amazing. They’d stayed in a rustic camp while doing day trips hiking and canoeing and done a couple of short overnight trips.

I thought I was doing the same program, and I’d resigned myself with rueful good humor. But when I got there, half my belongings were confiscated and the next thing I knew we were taking off, on foot, through the woods, and by the end of the first day I realized that our group was not going to be staying in a camp while we worked on our survival skills. This wasn’t camp, it was camping.

Knowing my mom and having had a few years (er, 20+) to think about it, I don’t believe she did this to me on purpose. I suspect she just chose whatever program fit into the time slot she wanted me to go, and didn’t overthink the difference between this and what my brothers had done.

Nevertheless, I was blindsided. I was entirely unprepared both physically and emotionally, and as the trip progressed, I totally broke down.

My experience on that wilderness adventure is what inspired my new novel, EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IS NOT RUINED. It’s partly written in the form of furious, sarcastic  journal entries from my protagonist, Ingrid, to her mother, detailing the various hardships of the trek. Ingrid also tells the tale in real time, and weaves in the story of her childhood spent moving between the opera houses of Europe as her mother, Margot-Sophia, rose toward opera stardom, only to have her career destroyed and their life changed irrevocably.

I’ve made it really, really clear that I am not Ingrid and Margot-Sophia is not my mom—my mom doesn’t sing, they look nothing alike, and their personalities and life stories are also nothing alike. And yet, there is something essential of my experience as a daughter, and about mother-daughter relationships, that I wanted to explore in this book. This is why the “is this autobiographical” question is always so interesting, because for me, I am often making up a story in order to tell the truth, or to get at a truth.

Two of the truths I was trying to get at in EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IS NOT RUINED are the double-edged sword of close mother-daughter relationships, and how parent child relationships are affected by mental illness.

Because of the way Ingrid spends her childhood—with her mother as her primary relationship and only constant, she experiences everything her mother experiences on a very deep and personal level, almost as though she, herself is experiencing it. This goes for the good parts, and the bad parts. Therefore, when Margot-Sophia loses her voice, and eventually goes into a deep depression, leaving Ingrid to fend for herself in a brand new city, Ingrid is entirely destabilized. She cycles through empathy and understanding, to fear, anxiety, fury, and of course a sense of abandonment.

Ingrid also, both consciously and unconsciously, begins to base many of her decisions on how she believes her mother will react to them. She abandons all of her own creative and musical pursuits for fear they will further upset her mother, and thus creates a division inside herself that is eventually impossible to be at peace with.

Being in the wilderness is hellish for Ingrid, but being the furthest she has ever been away from her mother does start to give her some perspective. In one of her journal letters to Margot-Sophia, Ingrid says: “I have tried to live so lightly, so carefully. I tried to be someone you would love enough to stop letting yourself spiral down. I lost my voice, too, trying to keep you alive.”

A large part of Ingrid’s journey is this need for her to detach from this too-entwined relationship she has with her mother, and give herself permission to be the person she needs to be. This, of course, is easier said than done, and I think this detachment from expectation is something every teen goes through, to some extent, on the way to becoming an adult.

So, while you don’t see a ton of Young Adult novels that put a mother-daughter relationship at the center, I felt it was important to write about. I have had some amazing responses from mothers and daughters reading EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IS NOT RUINED together (and separately!), and hope it will provoke both thought and discussion—between and about mothers and daughters.

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About EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IS NOT RUINED

Wild meets The Breakfast Club in this story of a girl who must survive an extreme wilderness experience to prove to her mother that she has the strength to pursue her dreams.

Then
Ingrid traveled all over Europe with her opera star mother, Margot-Sophia. Life was beautiful and bright, and every day soared with music.

Now
Ingrid is on a summertime wilderness survival trek for at-risk teens: addicts, runaways, and her. She’s fighting to survive crushing humiliations, physical challenges that push her to her limits, and mind games that threaten to break her.

Then
When the curtain fell on Margot-Sophia’s singing career, they buried the past and settled into a small, painfully normal life. But Ingrid longed to let the music soar again. She wanted it so much that, for a while, nothing else mattered.

Now
Ingrid is never going to make it through this summer if she can’t figure out why she’s here . . . and why the music really stopped.

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Bio: Danielle Younge-Ullman is the author of EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IS NOT RUINED (Viking, 2017), which is being published in the US, Canada, UK, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, Holland and France. She also wrote the YA novel LOLA CARLYLE’S 12 STEP ROMANCE, (Entangled/Macmillan 2015) and of the adult novel, FALLING UNDER, (Penguin, 2008).

Danielle studied English and Theatre at McGill University in Montreal, then worked as an actor for ten years before turning to writing. This was character-building time during which she held a variety of acting and non-acting jobs—everything from working on the stage and in independent films, to dubbing English voices for Japanese TV, to temping, to teaching Pilates. Danielle lives with her husband and two daughters in Toronto.

www.danielleyoungeullman.com
Twitter: @DanielleYUllman
https://www.facebook.com/Danielle-Younge-Ullman-Author-121367807980739/

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing