MY MOTHER NEVER DIES

The English-language debut of a bestselling French author.

There is something inherently awful—or at least awfully delicate—in the relationship between mothers and daughters. Such, in any case, is the lesson embedded in this slim, incisive collection of very short stories. In some of these narratives, the parent-child bond is simply absent—the two principle characters are shackled together by the accident of birth, rather than by love. Many of these stories, though, describe a union marred by an excess of intimacy. Mothers destroy their daughters by overidentifying with them, by violating the boundaries that distinguish nurturance and protection from smothering and abuse. In “My Best Friend,” a woman embraces her own second adolescence when her daughter becomes a teenager, and, in “My Dad’s Not a Monster, Mom,” a woman with too much knowledge of her father’s betrayals sacrifices herself to her mother’s frailty. Some of these stories are rather funny. “Liar” offers a skeptical, child’s-eye view of adults in general and mothers in particular. In “I Said One,” a woman who grudgingly agrees to provide her husband with a single child finds a shockingly straightforward solution to the problem of twins. Castillon dares the reader to laugh—or, possibly, to not laugh—at the narrator’s utter lack of maternal instinct. Some of the stories are less successful than others: The tale of a woman who drives her tomboy daughter to breast implants and worse—much worse—is heavy-handed, as is the title story. Still, the best entries are well-honed and distinguished by vivid, unflinching candor. And there’s even the occasional a ray of hope: “Shame” is a lovely portrait of a teenaged girl learning to appreciate her mortifying—which is to say loving, attentive and appropriately protective—mother.

Castillon’s stories depict the disasters wrought by the intensity of the mother-daughter bond, while still suggesting the possibility of a love that’s sublime in its fragility and imperfection.