About this deal
On the other end of the spectrum is Joanne, the first of her friend group to have a baby and struggling to make her friends accept that her circumstances have changed. Her baby shower descends into a bacchanal, with her friends snorting cocaine off her bump, while she cowers from her prenatal classes, afraid of facing up to her new reality.
As part of my review, I generally like to offer a short resume of the storyline as I see it, just to whet the appetite for what’s to come. However, to feature even a potted overview of this book, runs the risk of giving away too many spoilers, so I am going to keep this short piece deliberately vague, but believe me when I say that my words barely scratch the surface of this gripping story… Comedy and heartbreak ebb and flow throughout the novel, as each woman grieves the loss of a former version of her life. Bereft at the hardship of motherhood, Joanne says, with heartrending simplicity, "it just isn’t what I thought it was going to be". First is the monotony of Aoileann's existence and the unrelenting drudgery and normative horror that is her everyday. She has never known different. Her days consist of performing the act of caring for her "bed-thing" mother. She doesn't live, so much as she exists. Her life is a repetition of these uncaring acts of caring for the bed-thing that birthed her. Aoileann and Móraí no longer see Aoibh as human, but as a thing, a chore, a horror. The novel is published by the wonderful small indy Tramp Press, who have labelled this, her fourth novel, as White's 'literary fiction debut', not without a little controversy (see below from an Irish Times interview).And as Rachel's time to depart from the island nears, and Aoileann father and grandmother find out she has been interacting with Rachel and her child, the story comes to a satisfyingly disturbing conclusion.
The Islanders didn’t have eyes,’ said the stories. Instead, they had two watery boreholes that contained nothing. Looking into the eyes of an islander was like looking straight through to the milky sky behind them; the expanse would devour you.The bedbound parent in Filter This is a father suffering from Alzheimer’s — a disease White is all too familiar with, having lost her own father — the writer and television producer Kevin Linehan — to it in 2017. Aoileann’s daily life is punctuated by routine and thankless tasks, interspersed with taunting and humiliating her mother for the life she cannot have and the mother she cannot bond with. It is while scrubbing the floor of the cottage that she starts to see markings scratched on the floors where she realises that her mother has attempted to escape during the night, and when Aoileann writes them all down, she realises her mother has secrets and a past that that will slowly come to light which will impact her world in ways she cannot imagine. Meanwhile Aoileann's father lives on the mainland and visits once a month and while he is aware of his wife's condition Aoileann and her grandmother put on a show that they take better care of her: Teenager Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her newborn son move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love... This book is that feeling in words. It's visceral. It's stomach churning. It's horrifying. It's dread, and damp, and stale, and fusty.
Again this is serious stuff but White, who doubles as a podcaster on the macabre, has more fun in this section, letting the inner ‘creep flag’ fly and delving into weird and wonderful real-world body horror like necrophilia and consensual vampirism.I coloured it because my kids kept getting nits. It’s so glamorous!” she says, with typical candour. “It took about five hours. I was like: how do people do this on the regular shift? But I sat there and wrote my column while they did it.” Islanders pulled grateful survivors from the sea,’ the stories said. ‘Saving them from drowning only to deliver them to a worse end.’ I'd like to remember this book through the 3 main "themes", I guess, that stood out to me, using a quote that encaptures each.
Aoileann, meanwhile lives in her own disturbing state of nonexistence. She is avoided by islanders, who spit on the ground at the slightly mention or interaction with her. She is accused of polluting the island and its people with a "scáth suarach anama" – a "soul-stench". The island hasn’t treated her kindly either. A trip to the beach recalls memories of island men "coming upon" her, violating her while cheered on by their friends. It has been decided that the island “if it were to persist in being so useless to the mainland must earn its keep in tourism”, so an old factory is being turned into a museum. When artist-in-residence Rachel arrives with her baby son, Aoileann finds a focus for her perverse understanding of love. Móraí works there on its opening. It has an artist-in-residence, Rachel, who arrives with her infant son. Aoileann meets her on the beach and finds a focus for her perverse understanding of love. Jo Nestor, retired Adult Educator, lives in Leitrim and writes fulltime. Twice long-listed for the FISH memoir competition, she won the Leitrim Guardian Literary Award, 2020. Her writing features in the 2021 edition of the broadsheet, Autumn Leaves, the Leitrim Guardian, and at www.writing.ie She chooses to live in hope.Where I End is Sophie White’s first piece of literary fiction, published last month. I read all the content warnings about this book but nothing could have prepared me for how disturbing it was. Bloody hell!