Mom lit, the subgenre of women’s fiction that deals with mothers of younger children and the issues they have with work, family, and romance, often shows women at their catty worst: cruelly ostracizing the protagonist for petty reasons, making her and her child miserable. These women are shown as awful mean girls, freezing out the heroine for no good reason.
But sometimes these mean girls are right.
In All the Other Mothers Hate Me, Sarah Harman’s debut novel, protagonist Florence Grimes is a mess. A brief career in a girl band 11 years ago left her with rock star habits: sleeping with strangers in pub bathrooms, affairs with married men, stealing prescription pills from friends’ medicine cabinets. An occasional job delivering balloon arrangements doesn’t kick her out of bed in the morning, so her 10-year-old son Dylan is often late for school. Is it any wonder that no one wants to be friends with her?
On a field trip, Dylan’s rich obnoxious classmate Alfie disappears. The boys had fought before, and when Florence finds Alfie’s backpack in Dylan’s room, she’s terrified that Dylan is responsible for the boy’s disappearance. Now Florence will do anything to keep Dylan from being accused of the crime… including befriending another outcast mom to help her investigate Alfie’s family.
Florence (“Flo”) is one of the most unique protagonists I’ve come across in women’s fiction. Harman tells her story in a strong, confident voice, even as her tone becomes inconsistent. All the Other Mothers Hate Me starts off fast, sharp and funny, and the tone reminded me of Jesse Q. Sutanto’s debut, Dial A for Aunties. The difference is that Meddie’s accidental murder victim in Aunties absolutely deserved to die. It’s hard to root for someone who thinks that a missing 10-year-old is a “little shit,” as Flo declares in the opening pages of Mothers.
I’m a pretty big fan of the so-called “unlikeable” protagonist, but I had serious issues with Flo. Her back story is interesting—a singer in a pop band like “Girls5Eva,” Flo got pregnant at 21 by the band’s manager, who immediately left her after Dylan’s birth to marry her bandmate. When the band reformed, Flo was left out, but she still lives her life like a party girl ten years later. The casual affairs and drug use—not to mention leaving her 10-year-old home alone at night—made it very hard for me to like Flo. If her fellow moms had known about this behavior, they probably would have called CPS on her, or whatever the British equivalent is of that. (Flo is an American living in London.)
Still, her fierce desire to do anything to keep Dylan from facing the consequences for Alfie’s disappearance (anything but find a babysitter when she sneaks out for a booty call, that is) makes her inherently empathetic. The stakes are so high in this book—one missing 10-year-old, another 10-year-old who could have killed him—that I found the humor to be inappropriate. If Flo hadn’t been a mother—if the story had centered around her desire to launch a comeback, rather than a missing child—I would have been completely sucked in. Instead, I wanted to swoop in and rescue Dylan from his neglectful mom.
As far as the mystery goes, Harman keeps things humming along at a strong pace, with good plot points and developments. The ending works really well, although I wish she’d put a character on the canvas before the character’s absence became an important factor.
Although I didn’t like Flo, I’m heartened by the fact that All the Other Mothers Hate Me was issued by a major publisher. Readers don’t have to like a character to connect with her.
But it helps to have them hire a babysitter.
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