“My love for my mother is like an axe,” the narrator of Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk tells us. “It cuts very deep.” Set in the Spanish coastal city of AlmerĂa, the bookânow adapted into a film starring Sex Education‘s Emma Mackeyâis a sun-soaked exploration of a daughter bound to her sick mother.
Hot Milk joins a growing body of literature about absent, fading, or emotionally distant mothersâstories where the maternal figure recedes to the edges, allowing the daughter to take center stage. Think of Gwendoline Rileyâs My Phantoms and First Love, both depicting strained mother-daughter relationships, or Elena Ferranteâs The Lost Daughter, where the protagonist, Leda, is both an overlooked daughter and an abandoning mother, a collision that sparks emotional turmoil.
Writers often fall into the narrative habit of portraying mothers as either too powerful or too central, leaving little room for the daughterâs growth. These stories carve out space for daughters to struggle, define themselves, and evolve. Yet, they also show that we never fully escape our mothers. She lingers at the edges of our identityâboth a threat to our independence and the origin of our being.
The film adaptation of Hot Milk, written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and released in the UK last month, follows Sofia and her mother, Rose, as they travel to Spain seeking a cure for Roseâs mysterious paralysis. In the novel, Sofia seems to absorb her motherâs pain: “Sometimes, I find myself limping,” she says. “Itâs as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother.” Her psychosomatic symptoms mirror her motherâs illness, and she must break free from Roseâs feigned helplessness to reclaim her own body and desires.
Whatâs most striking is that Levy, who avoids sentimental resolutions, shows this separation isnât always clean. Sofiaâs freedom isnât triumphantâitâs unsettling and unstable. Levy doesnât promise clarity after detachment, only the dizzying uncertainty of it. Few stories capture this psychological tether so vividly.
In my own novel, Selfish Girls, three women grapple with being daughters while yearning for freedom. To write about this tension, I first had to ask: Why does the motherâs absence make for such compelling storytelling? Why do we keep returning to it? The answer lies in cultural contradictionsâmotherhood is revered as sacred, yet mothers themselves are often invisible or misunderstood. A mother will always be defined by her absence because she can never be fully presentâor never in the way we need. Thereâs also the ache of her being both familiar and unknowable. Sheâs the closest stranger weâll ever love, and thatâs narrative gold.
As Ferrante writes in The Lost Daughter: “The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves canât understand.” The question “Who was my mother, really?” drives the story.
My own mother was an enigma I had to release to become myself, yet she was also someone so closeâher laugh echoing in mine, her face glimpsed in my reflection. In a way, my novel reckons with wanting to understand her even as I detachedâgetting married, starting my own family, moving abroad, putting an ocean between us. Itâs about idolizing and rejecting her at once, the ambivalence and guilt of stepping away tangled with quieter grief and shame.I had felt abandoned long before. Maybe writing could help me revisit those unexplored depths of love and resentment, shaping them into something bearableâmy own storyâwithout losing the parts of my mother that still mattered.
My mother was an enigma I needed to release to become myself. Riley captures this tension with sharp realism and dry wit in First Love. Neve gets a text from her mother: “CUT ALL MY HAIR OFF DO YOU WANT BOBBLES AND BRUSHES ETC. MUM.” Only later does it emerge that sheâs struggling after a breakup. With perfect humor, Riley shows a mother whoâs physically present but emotionally distant. Neve remembers their strained visits and shallow phone calls.
For Riley, motherhood is a performanceâall surface, no depthâleaving daughters feeling alone even in their company. Itâs not enough for a mother to simply exist; she must embody the right kind of motherhood.
In her lecture Motherhood Today, philosopher Julia Kristeva references Donald Winnicottâs idea of the “good enough mother”âone who knows when to step back, making space for the childâs independence.
Levy, Riley, and Ferrante attempt on the page what we rarely achieve in life: absorbing the mother fully, letting her live within us. In Hot Milk, Levy doesnât resolve the mother-daughter struggle but lets it lingerâan undeniable, bodily inheritance. These stories donât offer catharsis but something braver: allowing the mother to remain inside the daughter, not as a burden or an ideal, but as a presence the self must grow around.
Selfish Girls is published by Hodder & Stoughton.
