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Where I End

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Later chapters explore the challenges faced by women in a society that values the female body over the mind, and demands nothing less than perfection from both. White contributes some of her own uncomfortable experiences, from sexual assault to self-harm. Sophie writes a weekly column ‘Nobody Tells You’ for the Sunday Independent LIFE magazine and her journalism has been nominated for numerous media awards. TV adaptations of her first two books are in development and she co-hosts the chart-topping comedy podcasts, Mother of Pod and The Creep Dive. Aoileann is a young girl living on a remote island off the coast of Ireland. Despite most of the island's small population being somewhat reclusive and different from the mainlanders, Aoileann and her grandmother are treated as outcasts - strange people in a strange house where strange things happen. Away from prying eyes, Aoileann and her grandmother are tending (I use this word loosely) to her mother who is bedridden, catatonic and has become something of a desiccated husk of a human. And yet, she creaks in the night…

Meanwhile Aoileann's father lives on the mainland and visits once a month and while he is aware of his wife's condition Aoileann and her grandmother put on a show that they take better care of her:Aoileann, a 19-year-old girl, spends her days helping her paternal grandmother care for her mother who is bed-bound after an unspoken family tragedy. Unschooled and friendless, Aoileann bathes, feeds and dresses her mother using a series of makeshift hoists, hiding her from the outside world and dressing her up specially for Dada, who visits once a month. I didn’t approach Where I End as: this will be my literary fiction debut. But I’m very happy that they’ve decided it is because I love literary fiction. I read as much literary fiction as commercial fiction. I don’t differentiate. I don’t think a lot of readers do.” This morning, I’m wondering what the link is between these books and my reading experiences? Quite simply, everything hinges on the writing. I have, in the past, abandoned books due to the writer’s heavy reliance on gratuitous violence or downright grossness. Life’s just too short. What stands out for me in Where I End is the impressive, engaging writing, superb scene setting, clearly defined characters, and Sophie’s own unique style.

You don’t have to be doing your needlepoint but parlaying it into an Etsy shop or something like that. I feel we don’t say enough that it’s very good to be very sh*t at your hobby … I’m in a skate group called the Huns of Anarchy and they’re amazing. Some of them are just so spectacular, dancing and doing all the moves and stuff. And I’m fairly happy with the level I’ve achieved. I don’t think I’ll ever be a better skater than I am now.” It’s funny because I do think when women write about their lives, people worry about their children.” (White and her husband Seb have three young sons, Roo, Ari and Sonny). “I don’t know if they worry about the children of male writers. But I do think it’s just always more transgressive, or more taboo, for a mother to write honestly about motherhood and her experiences.” Indeed Aoileann typically refers to her as 'the bed-thing' rather than as her mother, and her story sets out in stomach-turning mechanical detail the procedures she and her grandmother go through to keep the 'bed-thing' alive:If you’ve read more than one review of Where I End, you’ll have seen it repeatedly described as visceral, gruesome, chilling, unsettling, dark, twisted, and horrific. These are also my descriptions of the novel. It is a novel full of body horror. It is also full of psychological horror. It is bone-chillingly disturbing and made my skin crawl multiple times. The island made people do things, said the old people. And maybe, yes, for the island to remain so cold to what it has witnessed, it must have some hand in it. For the island to prosper it needs tourism. The old knitting factory is to be turned into a museum, and Deploying sub-genres and trope references like Swallow, Gore & More! and Final Girl in shouty B-movie fonts to theme her sections is clever. White uses these as a springboard into the weighty issues typically explored in horror, themes like death, madness, grief and addiction, all of which she has harrowing first-hand experience of. It is when she is on the beach that she meets Rachel, an artist and single mother of a young baby that Aoileann finds herself immediately drawn to. Watching Rachel with her baby causes Aoileann to see the maternal connection that she has never had, the love that so many take for granted she has never experienced. She becomes fixated with Rachel and longs to be as important to her as her baby seems to be.

Aoileann’s daily life is punctuated by routine and thankless tasks, interspersed with taunting and humiliating her mother for the life she cannot have and the mother she cannot bond with. It is while scrubbing the floor of the cottage that she starts to see markings scratched on the floors where she realises that her mother has attempted to escape during the night, and when Aoileann writes them all down, she realises her mother has secrets and a past that that will slowly come to light which will impact her world in ways she cannot imagine. A few of the missing appear to correspond to ‘graves’ and testimony from islanders claiming to be surviving family, would it seem, corroborate this. However, there are at least seven others entirely unaccounted for.

Aoileann is treated with suspicion and malice by the islanders, and doesn’t interact with them. She has no friends and little time for herself. Her only respite is when she can escape to swim in the sea, away from the responsibilities and demands that caring for her mother brings. Three generations of a family live together in the remote house closest to the cliffs, Aoileann, the 19 year old narrator, Móraí, her reticent grandmother, and Aoileann’s mother, the survivor of a disaster that the family has kept secret. Between them, they care for almost every need of the mother, and over time this has built an intense hatred of her within her daughter. During the early chapters, I found myself musing that there were parallels between this book and The Colony by Audrey Magee, with both set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland and featuring a resident artist character. I think they make good companion reads but do steel yourself for some seriously disturbing content. Aoileann has little interaction with the other people on the island who treat her as accursed ( The taint is something unique to me, I have learned. The islanders call it scáth suarach anama. Soul-stench), except when sometimes men come across her in a deserted location when they casually rape her, treating her as an object in rather the way she thinks about her mother. Those we did understand seemed unperturbed by what appears to have been a mass death of 21 people since March of ’31.

In a horrifying twist, it’s revealed that the mother has been scratching signs into the floorboards. I literally have my knitting in my bag right now. I would take it out if I didn’t think it was rude,” she says. No matter the situation, White is able to find the ridiculous and absurd in it - from ash-scattering to pregnancy. ‘There’s nothing so sci-fi in life as reproducing’, she says. It’s no wonder that giving birth and parenthood are mined time and again for horror, she observes.Aoileann’s every word, thought and deed, oozed hatred and malignant, malevolent intent. However, this was beautifully balanced and nuanced against some barely discernible and well disguised moments of loss and longing, as she searched for that illusive something she knew she had lost, or maybe never had, knowing it had left her damaged and somehow incomplete, whilst at the same time her awakening femininity saw her trying to disseminate and come to terms with her own sexuality. All of this is near the beginning of the story, where the protagonist, a nineteen-year-old girl who was born on the island, talks increasingly about death. The geography of the island in Where I End is kind of an outsized version of what Inis Meáin is like,” she says. “It’s got a really beautiful sandy beach at one end, and at the other end are these absolutely desolate sheer cliffs.” Inconsistencies in the record may be at fault. But even with some error or doubling up, we are still looking for the bodies of at least five people, some of whom appear to be members of the same family. When this is put to the group we assembled outside the island’s shop, one elderly man (60s–70s approx.) answered: ‘If a man goes and chooses to take his clan with him, what do we do?’

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