The Picador Book Room

Our new book by Anna Stothard, The Pink Hotel, reminds us that we have another book to add to our stellar Bad Mommies Mother’s Day collection. Issues with your mother got you down? Shopping for a Mother’s Day gift filling you with dread? Think you got it bad? Check out these moms and remember, yours is probably wonderful!

1. The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard: Our nameless narrator has just walked off with a suitcase of her mother’s belongings. Abandoned by Lily years ago, the narrator has come a long way to learn about her mom, and the stolen suitcase—stuffed with clothes, letters, and photographs—contains not only a history of her mother’s love life, but perhaps also the key to her own identity. As she tracks down her mother’s former husbands, boyfriends, and acquaintances, a risky reenactment of her life begins to unfold. 

2. Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman: When Hassman gives us this line: “My name is Rory Dawn Hendrix, feebleminded daughter of a feebleminded daughter, herself the product of feebleminded stock,” only five pages into the book, it’s a subtle clue that this will not be a tale of a heartwarming mother-daughter relationship. Calling Rory Dawn’s mother absent would be a kind way to put it, as her alcoholism takes control of both her own life and Rory’s.

3. The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn: The best thing that you can say about the mother in St. Aubyn’s series is that at least she isn’t as bad as the father. 

4. Every Day is Mother’s Day by Hilary Mantel: We’ll assume you’ve read Wolf Hall and that Bring Up The Bodies is currently on your nightstand but for something completely different from one of your favorite writers, may we suggest Mantel’s first novel, a dark domestic comedy about a half-wit daughter barricaded with her mother in their once-respectable home. Described as “Stephen King meets Muriel Spark,” this book is a great read, though it may be a demonstration of the worst mother/daughter relationship imaginable.

5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen: This National Book Award Winner is a darkly comic study of a “typical” American family. Matriarch Enid watches her family fall apart: her husband is losing his sanity to Parkinson’s; her eldest son is crushed by clinical depression; her daughter has destroyed her marriage; and her youngest son has lost his seemingly secure job and moved to Eastern Europe. Desperate for a sliver of joy, Enid sets out to bring the family together for Christmas, a seemingly futile endeavor. Hopefully your mom has slightly less dysfunctional family holidays to look forward to.

6. Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs: At a young age, Burroughs was given over by his mother to be raised by her unorthodox therapist, resulting in a less-than-normal childhood. In a home where the friendly neighborhood pedophile lived in a shed behind the house and electroshock therapy was a gripping form of entertainment, this book might be appropriate for Mother’s Day accompanied with a note reading, “Thank you for not doing this to me.”

7. Smut by Alan Bennett: While the mother in Bennett’s second novella, The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes, may not be quite on the level of some of Picador’s other Bad Moms, it cannot be denied that her relationship with son Graham is not ideal. We don’t want to give too much away, but we’ll just say that it’s never a good thing when you and your mother have the same love interest.

Congratulations to Hilary Mantel and Sheila Heti on making the Women’s Prize in Fiction longlist (formerly the Orange Prize). Picador is excited to publish both books in paperback this year.

Hilary Mantel on body image:

When I was thin I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like. When you sell clothes, you get very good at sizing people, but I had sized my customers as if they were fridge-freezers, or some other unnegotiable object, solid and with a height, width and depth. Fat is not like this. It is insidious and creepy. It is not a matter of chest-waist-hip measurement. You get fat knees, fat feet, fat in bits of you that you’d never thought of. You get in a panic, and believe in strange diets; you give up carbohydrate, then fat, then you subsist for a bit on breakfast cereal and fruit because it seems easier that way; then you find yourself weak at the fat knees, at risk of falling over in the street. You get up on winter mornings to pack ice cubes into a diet shake that tastes like some imbibed jelly, a primitive life form that will bud inside you. You throw tantrums in fat-lady shops, where the stock is grimy tat tacked together from cheap man-made fabric, choice of electric blue or cerise. You can’t get your legs into boots, or your feet into last year’s shoes.

Read the rest of the excerpt from Hilary Mantel’s memoir, Giving Up the Ghost,on The Guardian.

[Photo credit: Jane Bown]

[Hilary Mantel’s] unprecedented achievement of a second win with the sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, also lets us see more clearly a body of fiction spanning some 35 years and a dizzying variety of voices and genres. … Here is a writer who is good enough to persuade us that literary prizes do make sense after all.

EL James, JK Rowling, Hilary Mantel … the women who dominated publishing in 2012 / The Guardian