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.
Aoileann and Móraí, her taciturn grandmother, spend their days secretly tending to “the bed-thing”, Aoileann’s mother, the survivor of a private disaster. Aoileann loathes her mother, a hatred manifest in endless daily cruelties.
It has been decided that the island “if it were to persist in being so useless to the mainland must earn its keep in tourism”, so an old factory is being turned into a museum. When artist-in-residence Rachel arrives with her baby son, Aoileann finds a focus for her perverse understanding of love.
Odd as it sounds, I kept thinking about I’m a Celebrity … winner Stacey Solomon, who spoke recently about postnatal depression and how she “almost felt violated giving birth”. Solomon’s candid description resonates because motherhood in Where I End is not only a vicious invasion but also a complete loss of the self. Here, motherhood is the shipwreck at the bottom of the sea; broken and lost, barely recognisable. A baby is “the mother’s whole soul extracted, freed from her body and out of her control. It is her entire existence absorbed by this chunk of meat, a jumble of tiny bones and flickering organs … Dash the little thing against the rocks, throw it away, and the mother ends.”
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It is also a book about what it is to be a daughter. Every family creates its own reality, and without a template to work from, Aoileann’s attempts to refashion herself as the new child of a new mother are monstrous and (for the reader) terrifying. Dread hangs over every page, a horror that is both of Aoileann’s construction and the anchor cruelly pulling her down.
Sophie White’s prose is exquisite and disturbing, both brutish and beautifully crafted. Full of heart, Where I End is not for the faint-hearted.
