“Lies about my mother” – Controlled, Humiliated and Trapped in Marriage – Culture

A bossy husband torments his wife with weight control and dieting. Daniela Dröscher’s new novel follows a woman trying to break out of the patriarchal marriage.

One evening the father comes home from work. Mother and daughter know immediately: Nothing came of the hoped-for promotion. “His face was our weather,” says the book. In this case: a storm.

The father begins to complain. It is clear to him that his wife is to blame for his failure. She was too fat, “unpresentable”, and you couldn’t even take her to a Christmas party.

Daniela Dröscher’s novel “Lies about my mother” is full of such scenes. There are scenes of a woman’s humiliation at the hands of her husband. While she takes care of the children, cares for her seriously ill mother and tries to gain a foothold at the same time, her husband complains about her weight. Forces them to diet. Checks her weight every morning.

However, the author does not give a kilogram figure in the book. “It was a very conscious decision,” explains Daniela Dröscher. “I wanted to let my imagination run wild. What is thick and what is thin – that is relative. And that relative moment was important to me.”

Allegory of Patriarchy

The husband described in the book is an allegorical representation of patriarchy. He is petty and bossy. And above all, he has internalized the belief that he can dispose of his wife and her body in every respect.

The story is written from a child’s perspective. The whole thing takes place in a West German village in the 1980s. At that time, it was not long ago that women were allowed to have their own bank accounts or to work without their husbands’ consent. Childcare is definitely not an option in rural areas.

Playing with self-experience

“Lies about my mother” is an oppressive and ingeniously constructed text. Dröscher already dealt with her origins in her previous book “Show your class”. Now she sheds light on her childhood again. “Lies about my mother” is an autofictional book: Dröscher mixes self-experience with thought. It was rightly nominated for the German Book Prize.

The special feature: the novel’s plot is repeatedly interrupted with reflective insertions. According to Dröscher, she particularly likes essays. “It would have felt like cutting off something from myself if I hadn’t.”

In her essay passages, the author reflects, for example, on the origin of slimness ideals, on the beauty industry or on the alienation of the German language with the word “dick”.

What is thick and what is thin – that is relative.

These reflections vary in density and persuasiveness. The passages in which Dröscher discusses the writing process of the book are particularly interesting. For example, she reports about her concern that she might harm her own mother with this text or misrepresent the past.

Lying with Mother’s blessing

In a conversation, her mother finally gives her a free pass to write whatever she wants. The fact that the reader does not know whether these dialogues with the mother are real or fictional gives them a very special appeal.

The essay insertions give the book an ambiguity. But the plot of the novel also carries and remains exciting – until the end.