I’m actually a little late posting about The Mermaids Singing, having finished it last week in order to join in on The Written Word’s discussion for the book. (Incidentally, this was TWW’s final book club selection. Stephanie has decided to discontinue the book club due to some major changes in her life, particularly the adoption of her new daughter!) Lisa Carey’s novel is another one of those literary treasures that I would likely have never discovered were it not for a book club. I love being introduced to new authors and books, especially when it turns out to be one that I enjoyed as much as I did Mermaids.

The story centers around three women – Cliona, her daughter Grace, and Grace’s daughter, Gráinne – and their troubled relationship. Grace, dying from cancer, is unable to reach out to her teenaged daughter beyond veiled meanings in written notes. Gráinne, who doesn’t know how to cope with a mother who’s suddenly not the exuberant force she once was, withdraws as well, seeking solace elsewhere. When Grace dies, Cliona, a grandmother who Gráinne never knew she had, arrives to take her home to Ireland, a place that Grace escaped from, never to return. The chapters alternate among the three women, back and forth in time, as we slowly come to learn of the events that shaped their lives.

Reading this book was much more of a personal experience for me than I had anticipated. What struck me so powerfully about this story are the bonds between mothers and daughters, particularly those that are fixed emotionally because of death. I could empathize with Gráinne, who will never know her mother beyond the point where she died. Theirs was not allowed to mature into the adult mother/daughter relationship. So too, were Cliona and Grace, and Cliona and her own mother. One particular passage especially struck me as embodying the essence of this loss. Cliona is reflecting on the last days of her father’s life, and how it made her reconsider her mother and their relationship:

For the first time I had the notion that my father had seen my real mother, and I her façade, rather than the other way around. Perhaps I had merely misunderstood her, just as I believed that Grace misunderstood me.

My father died twenty-three years after his wife, and yet it was my mother I grieved at his funeral. I grieved that I had not known her, that she had died before I was a mother, before I had a chance to understand that no one is the mother she plans to be.

This is one of the reasons I still grieve for my mother, who died when I was 24 and she was 48. Our relationship is frozen at that point, and I will never know how she would have aged into an old woman, and how our relationship would have changed over the years. How well did I really know my mother and what secrets and untold stories did she keep? For me, that is the real tragedy in this book, how little we sometimes know those with whom we share this fundamental bond, and the point at which the ability to do that becomes impossible.