DESPERATELY NORMAL

Daughters outgrow their parents in Gwendoline Riley's unsparing novels.

-  JAMES WOOD

In the essay "Dreams of Her Real Self," the Australian writer Helen Garner performs the difficult task of honestly appraising her mother. Difficult because love and honesty may be at odds; it is discomfiting to outgrow your parents, to feel more intelligent or more sophisticated than they are, as if you were somehow robbing them of a gift that they already gave you. And careful observation can be so close to mockery: "She used to wear hats that pained me," Garner writes. "Shy little round beige felt hats with narrow brims.... And she stood with her feet close together, in sensible shoes." Garner admits that she finds it hard to get her mother into focus, in part because her overbearing father did such a good job of blocking the view, "as he blocked her horizon," and in part because her mother's hesitant self-effacement rendered her both genuinely obscure and obscurely irritating: "She seemed astonished that someone should be interested in her." To be her intellectual superior, Garner writes, "was unbearable." Yet she also admits to the guilty pleasure of refusing her mother the easy concessions that she knows will make her happy. An intimate portrait expands naturally into a social and political sketch: daughter and mother represent not only different generations but different examples of female ambition and opportunity.