January 13, 2025
Like Mother, Like Mother, by Susan Rieger
Admittedly, it’s an odd book, Susan Rieger’s third novel, Like Mother, Like Mother, told almost entirely through through expository dialogue by characters who talk like people in like golden age film, the protagonist dead in the opening sentence—”Lila Pereira died on the front page of The Washington Globe.” I wasn’t sure in the opening chapters that the writer would be able to pull this off at all, but soon I was in the thrall of Rieger’s rigorous prose and compelled by its energy, and the Ephron-esque punch punch punch of this story, which is an ode to the knots and tangles of family ties and also to the culture of journalism.
Lila Pereira may be dead, but Rieger resurrects her immediately to show her style, unique, brutal and awesome at once. When she was two, her mother had been taken taken away to die in an insane asylum, her children left to fend with their abusive father. Lila decides that she’d be just as ineffectual as a mother herself, and only consents to have children when she falls in love with and marries Joe Maier, who she knows will be a perfectly good mother himself and accepts her otherwise refusal of the maternal role. Which sounds good in theory, but Grace, their youngest daughter, resents her mother’s devotion to her work and absence from home, writing her pain into a roman a clef about a monstrous mother, which backfires when Lila dies not long after publication and Grace looks awfully unsympathetic.
After her mother’s death, Grace takes on the job of finding out what really happened to Lila’s mother all those years ago, using her own journalistic chops (not far from the tree) to uncover the mystery, and everything that happens after that is a pleasure to behold.
