Like Mother, Like Mother

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of rape, mental illness, death by suicide, physical, and emotional abuse.

Grace is the novel’s dynamic protagonist, whose internal conflict regarding who she and her mother are is the catalyst for her change. As a young woman, Grace blames Lila for her lack of attention without really comprehending everything Lila endured and internalized as a child of an absentee mother and abusive father. As she ages, she publishes her novel, The Lost Mother, which highlights Lila’s emotional absentness as much as, if not more than, Zelda’s actual absence from Lila’s life. The novel’s reception, Lila’s retirement, and her almost immediate cancer diagnosis and death prompt Grace to empathize with Lila in a way she never has before. In her youth, she hopes to learn that Zelda got away and started a new life; as Grace learns how to see her mother with more compassion, however, she begins to hope that Lila was right, that Zelda actually did die in the psychiatric hospital, because of how painful the alternative is. Later, Grace develops empathy and compassion for Zelda (now Frida) because—Grace realizes—no one protected Zelda from Aldo any more than she could protect herself or her children.