Susan Rieger’s third novel, is, as the title indicates, a story about mothers — or rather, mothers and daughters. At the center of the story is Lila Pereira, whose death of lung cancer is reported on the first page but whose life and personality unfold throughout the book, along with the stories of her daughter Grace and her mother, Zelda.
Like Mother, Like Mother is divided into three sections, one for each of the protagonists. Lila, whose section comes first, dominates the novel (and her family members) even when she is absent. Growing up in a poor Jewish family in Detroit, Lila was physically abused by her father and lost her mother, Zelda, who was committed to an asylum when Lila was two. Eight years later, her father told the family that Zelda had died in the asylum.
Lila’s difficult childhood makes her tough and guarded. Lila says, “I don’t have an inner life. I do therefore I am. Socrates blinked. The examined life isn’t worth living. Look what happened to him.” Lila escapes her father through college, a career in journalism and her marriage to Joe, a kind and caring man who agrees to raise their children since Lila considers herself incapable of being maternal.
The second section follows Grace, Joe and Lila’s youngest daughter. Grace grows up resenting her mother for her absences, for her leaving the parenting duties to Joe. Even so, she is more like her mother than her father, becoming a journalist after college, defining her philosophy in a series of what she calls “Lilaisms” — things Lila says that reveal her beliefs and rules to live by. Grace shares one such “Lilaism” with her college friend Ruth: “No whining in public. The story gets lost. All they remember is that you’re a whiner.”
Lila doesn’t whine, but young Grace does. She resents her mother’s emotional distance but is also fascinated by her, keeping a notebook on her, collecting her stories, quoting her pithy sayings. Much later, she tells Ruth that she “wasn’t so much spying on Lila as majoring in Lila.” Whereas Lila chooses to believe her mother died in the asylum, Grace wonders if that is a convenient lie told by Lila’s father and ponders trying to track Zelda down. As Grace puts it: “This is a ghost story. Whether Zelda died or lived, she haunts our family.” This search for Zelda and the truths revealed during that search occupy the final section of the book.
Like Mother, Like Mother is all about the mothers, and inevitably, the daughters, who inhabit the novel. Lila may not have believed in the examined life, but this book thoroughly examines how life circumstances shape character and relationships.
