about the book
Having a baby doesn’t make you a mother anymore than buying a piano makes you Beethoven!
Always cheerful Josephine Hurst is the perfect doting matriarch…or so it would seem. She has an extremely handsome tech-guru husband, Douglas; two beautiful daughters, Rose and Violet (20 and 16); a brilliantly intelligent son, William (12); and a to-die-for historical landmark home in prestigious Woodstock, New York. Her life is picture perfect, and that is how she makes sure every other person sees it. But behind closed doors, it is very different. Josephine is manipulative and controlling.
A year ago, Rose disappeared. She went to her college classes one morning and never returned; supposedly she ran off with a mysterious boy. Josephine makes sure their life isn’t interrupted by Rose’s waywardness. When issues come up at William’s school, she diagnoses her youngest child with Asperger’s and a seizure disorder and takes over his home-schooling. He dotes on her, and she quickly turns him against the other members of the family, including his spineless alcoholic father
The second child, Violet, is another matter entirely. Her reaction to Rose’s abandonment is to turn to hallucinogenic drugs, mysticism, and Janis Sallekhana, a ritualistic fasting to death. Near starvation, she ingests five soaked ground-up organic Heavenly Blue Morning Glory seeds, a legal cheap alternative to LSD.
What happens next will shock you! William is slashed and Josephine has Violet committed to a psychiatric hospital. When Children’s Protective Services comes knocking on the Hurst’s door, the web of lies and family’s dirty little secrets are revealed…and Josephine’s impeccable façade crumbles.
If you are a faint-hearted reader, go find another book. The ending to this thriller will shock you to your very core. Let’s just put it this way, Josephine Hurst is definitely not playing with a full deck!
about the author
Koren Zailckas was born in Saudi Arabia and attended high school in Massachusetts. By her freshman year, she was routinely binge drinking. Over the next six years, she ended up having her stomach pumped because of alcohol poisoning, and black outs led to waking in unfamiliar places and a horrible sexual experience. Her problems stemmed from an extreme lack of confidence, deep unhappiness, and complex family issues.
While Koren was at Syracuse University, she realized that her decade of bingeing was not solving her problems, so she stopped drinking. But all those unhappy years left her with rage, troubled friendships, and tragic romances that persistently tangled her life. The only way to work through her issues was to write about her memories. The results were her two acclaimed memoirs, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, and Furry.
After writing successfully about her own experiences, now what was she going to do? “I’ve always liked the idea that the stories we tell each other should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.” That was her goal for Mother, Mother, Koren’s first fiction novel. For those readers who grew up in happy, loving families, her novel examines the daily confusion and terror experienced by someone living with a parent with a personality disorder. It also assures those living in this type of situation that they are not alone or to blame.
Writing alternately as her characters Violet and William helped Koren explore the way siblings can be raised by the same parent and still have entirely different viewpoints. The psychotic matriarch, Josephine, is nothing like Koren’s own mother, but Koren did have extreme mother issues. Writing the scary story helped Koren cope with her own anxiety. Basically she terrified herself and made her way through it!
This international writer also contributes to The Guardian, U.S. News & World Report, Glamour, and Seventeen magazine. Koren lives with her family in the New York Catskills Mountains. She is married to Eamon Hamilton, the singer/songwriter from the popular band, Brakes.
Sources:
Author website
Author biography: American Program Bureau
Author interview: Bustle
Author interview: BookPage
Also by Koren Zailckas:
Smashed : Story of a Drunken Girlhood. Viking Penguin. 2005.
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