Nobody writes about the reality of parenthood better than Lucy Caldwell

Here’s a line from ‘Mother’s Day’, the final story in the new book. The narrator is talking about Mandy, the woman who married her father after her mother died. “She’d always said she’d never try to be my mother, and she didn’t, she never did.” What a weight of feeling rises from that little not-quite-repetition — “she didn’t, she never did.” We infer that the narrator both wanted and did not want Mandy to try to be her mother, and that she grieves, still, not just the loss of her own mother but the failure of the world to supply her with an adequate mother substitute. She is both admiring of Mandy’s tact, and bitter about what Mandy couldn’t give her. Not bad going for six words.