Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

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Franqui doesn’t demonize either Indian customs or American ones. Yes, Swati inserts herself into Rachel’s life in Mumbai, but she’s accepting when Rachel drinks alcohol, smokes cigarettes, and associates with male friends. When Rachel calls Swati by her first name and not an honorific for mother-in-law, Swati holds her tongue: when Swati was a young bride, she could never have gotten away with any of these things, nor would she ever even have thought of doing them in the first place. This realization is what convinces Swati to divorce her husband, Vinod, after forty years.

White, Peter (9 June 2023). "ABC Pilot Watch: Comedies Public Defenders& Motherland Remake Keeping It Together& Dramas The Hurt Unit& Judgement Not Moving Forward". Deadline Hollywood . Retrieved 10 June 2023. A chaotic and blunt-talking single mother who is unpopular with Amanda's clique. Liz forms a trio alongside Kevin and Julia. She has two sons, Charlie and Max, of whom she shares custody with her ex-husband, Lee. With fury, rage and spite, it seems. Theroux’s new novel Mother Land has as an epigraph the famous lines from WB Yeats’s “Remorse for Intemperate Speech”: “Great hatred, little room, / Maimed us at the start. / I carry from my mother’s womb / A fanatic heart” – which pretty much sums up the tone of the book. Stephen King in the New York Times has described Mother Land as “an exercise in self-regarding arrogance and self-pity” (which is certainly one way to read it), though he also admitted that he enjoyed the book “against my will”. The acerbic and selfish leader of the "Alpha Mums", obsessed with compliments on her youthful appearance and energy. Extremely image-conscious, she pretends her marriage is perfect, but her husband Johnny treats her dismissively, and they divorce in the second series. She has two children, Manus and Georgie. A timid Irish mum with several children who seems to be perpetually pregnant. She is one of Amanda's friends, although Amanda treats her poorly, leading her to grow closer to Julia, Liz, and Kevin as the series progresses. She is extremely over-protective of her children.This was a very difficult book to stomach given that Jay's (Paul Theroux's?) family dynamics are astoundingly similar to the dynamics at play in my own family. On the one hand, it was incredibly refreshing to see something written that so accurately elucidated what my experience has been - there were quite a few times that I shouted out "Yes! That's exactly right!" or "Wow and I thought I was the only person who had a family like this!" But . . .

Leah Franqui's Mother Land is a delightful exploration of cultural expectations and the way they shape identity. The basic set-up is simple. After meeting and marrying in New York, Rachel and Dhruv move to Mumbai. Dhruv grew up in Kolkata, so the move is a return home for him; for Rachel it's sudden immersion in an unfamiliar culture. To complicate matters, shortly after the couple's arrival, Swati, Dhruv's mother, shows up on their doorstep, announcing that she has left Dhruv's father and will be living with them. What follows is a fierce, if well-meant, battle of wills as Rachel and Swati each try to shape the other to meet cultural expectations. While the first third of the book was a bit slow and repetitive I am happy to recommend it based on the last two-thirds of the book alone. Julia’s builder, on whom she develops a crush and flirts with awkwardly despite his indifference (and inflated invoicing). Let me also clear that “𝙎𝙡𝙪𝙢𝙙𝙤𝙜 𝙈𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙤���𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙚” DOES NOT DEFINE INDIA WHICH IS MADE BY A BRITISH DIRECTOR.

To those in her Cape Cod town, Mother is an exemplar of piety, frugality, and hard work. To her husband and seven children, she is the selfish, petty tyrant of Mother Land. She excels at playing her offspring against each other. Her favorite, Angela, died in childbirth; only Angela really understands her, she tells the others. The others include the officious lawyer, Fred; the uproarious professor, Floyd; a pair of inseparable sisters whose devotion to Mother has consumed their lives; and JP, the narrator, a successful writer whose work she disparages. As she lives well past the age of 100, her brood struggles with and among themselves to shed her viselike hold on them. One can read Mother Land, then, in a state of appalled fascination, the transgression of full-on family hatred licensed, but also safely displaced on to another family. The portraits of Mother’s children, themselves ageing and succumbing to illness as she lives on past a century in fine fettle, are especially well done, and the novel’s climax, with its hints of an inversion of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, are sharp and subtle.

After losing her mother's help with childcare, Julia faces a far bigger role in her children's lives than before. She initially tries to become part of the Alpha Mums group, but realises she has more in common with parenting "misfits" Liz and Kevin. She has two children: Ivy and James, and is married to Paul.Swati slept with her best friend’s son she slept with a man that is the same age as her own son and they grew up together and then she slept with him and she hooked up with a boy who was practically like her own son I do not understand what that was at all what she whyyyy????? I thought when i moved here that I would find the things I wanted, but I have only become more and more confused. I keep pouring things into my body to fill it up, to make it full of something that will make me feel less...alone. Less unhappy. But it doesn't work. Smoke & rum and work and even people. None of it works." DNF I made it to 4 cds out of 19. The narrator was probably perfect for reading this - he had a very haughty superior sounding voice (Jefferson Mays) which was perhaps perfect for the character. However, I found this was, of the 4 cds I could listen to, petty complaining and making something out to be bigger or more terrible than it actually was. I could not imagine that I would sit and listen through that for 23 hours. Now I'm reading that this is very close to an autobiographical story by Theroux. More than once while listening to this litany of petty complaints, I wanted to say "Dude, pull up a chair, you want to talk about mother issues? Because this here this is nothing - you're making mountains out of mole-hills." And repeating them. Incessantly.