Mean Mommies: Care in Contemporary Queer Literature

In an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 43, “Fixation,” Jenny Fran Davis considers the portrayal of care in contemporary queer literature.

By Jenny Fran DavisNovember 27, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Cultural Studies

• Gender & Sexuality

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 43: Fixation. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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“MOTHER ME MEANLY,” Helen begs the couple she’s trying to seduce over text. They’re lesbians, a bit older, and when they fire back that she’s using the word incorrectly, Helen is thrilled by the scolding. Further, she muses: “Which word they meant—mother or meanly—was never made clear to me.” Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t matter. Helen wants only to be reprimanded. 

Mother and meanly are terms that animate Marissa Higgins’s excellent debut novel, A Good Happy Girl (2024)—words at either end of the continuum of care and neglect. These concerns stalk the novel from its first pages to its very last. The story begins with Helen, a Boston-area lawyer who live streams fetish videos of her feet from her law office’s bathroom stalls. Trauma-addled and cough syrup–addicted, Helen arranges a preliminary meeting with the older lesbian couple, Catherine and Katrina (a.k.a. “the wives”), at a coffee shop. There’s a New England chill in the air; all three sip coffee with alternative milk (the wives are vegan before six p.m.) and size each other up in unspoken assessment. The wives seem to be willing to do what Helen needs them to do: to take care of her, and to hurt her. Sometimes both. What Helen mostly wants, though, is for the wives to pay attention to her. To care about her enough to understand the type of love she’s seeking, which may or may not be the type of love she needs.

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Are throuples really connecting in coffee shops all around us? They must be, if recent queer literature is any indication. The coffee shop scene at the start of A Good Happy Girl calls to mind an early encounter in Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service (2022), in which Eve, a young woman dating a dependable butch doctor(!), enters a dalliance with a straight couple consisting of a brash male feminist and his tenderhearted, painterly mistress.

In A Good Happy Girl, as in Acts of Service, a narrator seeks something specific yet amorphous from the couple she courts over coffee. In Helen’s words, what she wants is for “the same wom[a]n who abandoned me to repair me.” Not literally the same woman, of course, but one who shares the designation, the patron saint of care and caretaking herself: Mommy.

Mommy. She’s a therapy punch line, a camp queen (see gay guys singing “Mother!” at sexy, powerful actresses), an all-encompassing enigma whose influence looms large—so large that it’s easy to lose sight of her actual, physical body and abstract her into symbolism. Mommy’s eroticism is too obvious to be genuinely transgressive (the cast of Monterey women duking it out on HBO’s Big Little Lies is a good example of catty but ultimately declawed mommies) but still packs a visceral punch (Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt contains the unforgettable image of fur coat–wearing Carol locking eyes with mousy Therese at the store where Carol has come to buy her daughter a Christmas present). In books, particularly gay ones—take Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart (2019), in which she fixates on the life of her mother, Elvira—Mommy is never far from the page. How could she be?

From 20th-century psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan) to pop memoir (I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy has sat on the bestseller list for almost two years straight), literature has long been preoccupied with mean mothers. By now, we know that mothers structure; mothers shape. Their influence weaves through a life like a threaded needle, puncturing and sealing the choices we make and the partners we seek.

We have also, in the past 10 or so years, lived through a literary moment during which women have wrestled with ambivalence surrounding motherhood—namely, do they want to be one? These mothers aren’t mean, but they are committed to troubling, in writing, the choice to mother in the first place. On the nonfiction shelf, we have Sheila Heti’s hydra-headed indecision on display in Motherhood (2018); Rivka Galchen’s meticulous observations about the weirdness of babies in Little Labors (2016); and Maggie Nelson’s genre-breaking exploration of queer family-making and maternity in The Argonauts (2015), in which she describes her intellectual mentors as “many-gendered mothers of the heart.” On the fiction side, Rachel Yoder’s protagonist turns feral in Nightbitch (2021), Torrey Peters’s characters navigate trans parenthood in all its heartbreak and complexity in Detransition, Baby (2021), and the so-called “bad mother” comes in for keen critique in Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers (2022). These books run the gamut from cultural criticism to speculative fiction. All of them—and many more I haven’t read, I’m sure—are important entries into the literary canon, which is vastly underpopulated by mothers and dispatches about the experience of motherhood: namely, how it actually feels to be someone’s mother, and what happens when that feeling isn’t uniformly positive, or easy.

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In the intro to their anthology Mommy Wound (2024), Katie Brewer Ball and Vick Quezada write that “[m]aybe mothering is another word for the project of care and stewardship.” I think so, and if Mommy is a state of mind, an energy, an aesthetic, even a politics surrounding care, what might literature teach us about mothering today?

Undeniably more so than fatherhood, motherhood’s unique cultural status renders it capacious, all-encompassing: not just a job but also an identity; not just a privilege but also a responsibility; not just something one does with one’s days but also a life purpose. It makes sense that Mommy is ripe for metaphorizing; she’s so vast and mutable that she can be or signify almost anything. It’s this symbolism that, as a reader and as a writer, interests me the most.

As someone who is not (yet) a mother to anyone but my pug, I enjoy virtually any account of motherhood, in all its ugliness and beauty; I fear, however, that I’ve come up against the limits of what I can write about the literal physical or emotional experience of motherhood. As a reader, though, I’m particularly fascinated by the radical potential of motherhood on display in contemporary queer fiction and the frameworks it draws upon or elicits, which expand Mommy further than her literal limits, gesturing at alternative models for care and romance and asking what we can be to each other when what we are to each other transcends immediate recognition—in other words, what it means to Mommy without precisely mothering.

“Mommy is your world,” I often tell my pug, and in doing so, something powerful and wickedly delicious swells within me. The sheer power of such a statement! It’s enough to take your breath away. I’m a potent demon in these moments: the world spins on my finger; my presence fills the frame of my pug’s existence, eclipsing everything and everyone else. Anything I say is law, any choice I make sacrosanct. I am high on control yet brought back down to earth by solemn responsibility. My mommy ministrations are few but detailed: keeping my good, happy girl fed, clean, cool, and entertained. 

The Mommy-Baby/Serf-Tyrant framework, which the scholar Julia Golda Harris first wrote about in her newsletter Dyke Domesticity, and which I’ve heard no fewer than three people reference organically (“You know the Mommy/Serf thing?”), provides an important model for understanding how maternal care structures contemporary queer relationships. Basically, the chart has two axes: Mommy-Baby along one, and Tyrant-Serf along the other. Each person can locate herself in one of four quadrants depending on how she identifies: as a mommy or a baby, a serf or a tyrant.

“Mommy-Baby is primarily about care-taking,” Harris writes:

A paradigmatic Mommy is watchful, attentive to the needs of the other, and perhaps uncomfortable being taken care of. Meanwhile, a paradigmatic Baby enjoys or needs to be taken care of. […] Mommy Tyrants and Baby Serfs are often drawn to each other, as are Mommy Serfs and Baby Tyrants.

Alongside caretaking, at the heart of the Mommy-Baby/Serf-Tyrant continuum sits the issue of power: who desires it—and who desires only to give it up? We might say that Mommies and Tyrants desire power, that Babies and Serfs desire only to give it up. But the possibility of being a Baby Tyrant highlights the mutability of power within all relationships, maternal, romantic, or otherwise (sometimes, the “weaker” actor actually holds more power than the “stronger”). Power is a seam that joins two people; crucially, it belongs to them both, if at different times and in different ways.

Care and power are distinct yet related things. While the Mommy-Baby axis perhaps deals more explicitly with acts of care, and the Tyrant-Serf axis attends to acts of power, there’s also the question of service—a term that unites the two concerns. Thomas Grattan’s novel In Tongues (2024) follows a young gay man named Gordon, who flits in and out of the lives of two older, wealthier gay men (“Daddies”). Gordon is at first hired help, the wealthy men’s dog-walker. Yet his youth, which positions him—if not characteristically then at least literally—as Baby, enables his Tyranny.

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In a letter dated 1870, Emily Dickinson requested the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson to “tell [her] what home is,” adding, “I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” To whom do you hurry when you’re troubled? In recent queer literature, young people hurry to their elders. In Michelle Hart’s We Do What We Do in the Dark (2022) and Bronwyn Fischer’s The Adult (2023), those elders are lesbian professors, confusing as they are wise. In Higgins’s A Good Happy Girl, Helen hurries to Katrina and Catherine.

Psychology’s attachment theory holds that the way we were cared for as infants creates infant attachment patterns, which in turn shape how we love later on, as adults. “Secure attachment” is the best-case scenario; most of us are stuck with either “anxious” or “avoidant” attachment styles and their attendant consequences. In theory, Donald Winnicott’s theory of “good enough”—as opposed to, say, perfect—mothering (1953) relieves some pressure on Mommy; at the end of the day, though, we all know whom to blame for our issues.

“The core issue at the center of women’s empowerment is the Mother Wound,” writes the therapist and self-help blogger Bethany Webster, whose website I stumbled upon after googling “what is mother wound.” “The taboo about speaking about the pain of the Mother Wound is what keeps it in place and keeps it hidden in shadow, festering, and out of view.”

In one of my all-time favorite books, Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest (1978), the author—Joan Crawford’s daughter, adopted as an infant—details her mother’s abusive behavior, ill-fated dalliances with men and women, and insane, thrilling, narcissistic antics. Of course, the 1981 film adaptation’s portrayal of “Mommie dearest” soon became a camp icon, Faye Dunaway’s shrill warning about clothes hangers (“No wire hangers ever!”) and face slathered with cold cream a predictable figure in drag performance. Christina Crawford paints her mother as a dizzyingly cruel tornado of violence who vacillates between abject neglect and physical abuse.

Festering and out of view. For the cameras pointed at the mother-daughter duo in the 1940s, of course, everything looked perfect: the matching mommy-and-me outfits and sweet domestic scenes. The disparity between how things looked and how things felt was a reason that the public was so shocked and outraged—at Christina for puncturing the perfect image, at Joan for her alleged behavior—when the book was published. The feeling of looking at the photos of Joan and Christina and remembering the sinister dynamic in which these two were actually enshrined is much like the feeling of watching tradwife videos and remembering that she, this nice mommy, usually exists in a fairly scary family unit in which religious fundamentalism mingles with white supremacy.

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Why are we so taken with narratives of deceit, abuse, and neurosis that involve Mommies? When Gypsy Rose Blanchard arranged for her boyfriend to kill her mother after years of medical abuse, including unnecessary surgeries, we couldn’t look away. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is maybe the meanest thing Mommy can do: exploit her power in such a twisted way that it distorts reality and makes her children sick, all so that she can hold on to her power—the power of care and caretaking, the power of administering treatments, the power of making all the decisions. Perhaps it’s because we already understand, implicitly, that mommyhood always contains both care and brutality; every time I read Mommie Dearest, I do so in a thrilled trance, hungry for every violent, disturbing detail.

After all, if Mommy is a wound, she’s a rich and fertile one. Mommies raise good girls—or bad ones. Growing up in the early 2000s, I saw copies of The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence (2009) on many bookshelves; the book’s thesis is that the expectations placed on girls to be “nice, polite, modest, and selfless” are detrimental to their growth and well-being. I’m on board with the gist of the book’s message, I guess, but I’m scared to think of what might have happened had my parents indulged my monstrousness instead of eliciting niceness, politeness, and modesty. Would I have anything to agitate against now? What would my life be about, if not trying to reconcile my inner tyrant with my genuine care for those around me?

You also have to wonder what it would actually be like for a good girl to mother you. Mommy isn’t really a girl, though; maybe she once was, dressed and done up in coquettish pink, but now she has reached the flip side of girlhood, knows the score. You might look at her and think, Is this all there is?

In the final pages of Emily Ratajkowski’s essay collection My Body (2021), the model gives birth. Finally, we watch her come into herself and her body; finally, she understands her body’s limits and power at the same time. For Ratajkowski, giving birth is both an escape from endless fascination—her own and others’—with her body and the beginning of a new relationship with it.

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I’ll address the elephant in the room: the unavoidable fact that the trope of the Mean Mommy and her particular brand of care is explicitly sexual. Mommy nurses and spanks; she administers medicine and doles out warnings. Everything she does and says is for your own good; she has high expectations of you, higher standards than you have for yourself. Crucially, she’s sexy. Punishing, in a hot way. Don’t disappoint me. She’s not vicious or vindictive; she does have your best interests at heart—think girlboss, but make it sexy. She may be brutal, but she’s brutally honest, brutally loyal.

“It obviously helps to be wearing lipstick,” a friend explained to me when I asked how they would define Mean Mommy. Of course, she usually has ample cleavage too—all the better to milk you with.

Is it too obvious to say that the figure of the Mean Mommy in adult relationships, particularly gay ones, irritates and soothes, in equal measures, the wounds left from our actual mommies? It’s just—Mean Mommy cares so much. She’s not mad, just disappointed. She knows you can do better! Mean Mommy is a femininity that weaves together maternal diplomacy and girlish sex appeal.

Another friend compared the “frightful but titillating” meanness of Mommy to the “genuinely terrifying” meanness of Daddy: “Mean Mommy isn’t going to kill you,” they said, decisive.

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Navigating care in contemporary queer novels often happens along lines of power: age, class, race, social status. The characters in these novels reproduce, resist, and react to these agitating discrepancies by acting within the mother/child framework.

Susan Choi’s groundbreaking and iconic My Education (2013) was the novel that launched a thousand Mean Mommies. In the book, Regina is a graduate student initially taken by her hunky professor; when she meets his beautiful—and still breastfeeding—wife Martha, though, everything changes, and she becomes the object of Regina’s sexual and emotional fixation. There isn’t a ton of tenderness between Regina and Martha: their sex scenes are brutal and thrashing, all hard elbows and passionate clawing.

In Couplets: A Love Story (2023), Maggie Millner’s narrator leaves the care and consistency of a long-term straight relationship for the seesaw of care and neglect with a new lover, this one gay, in a spellbinding and cross-genre excursion that also has, at its periphery, the specter of a throuple in which the narrator’s lover’s ex is embroiled. In Olivia Gatwood’s Whoever You Are, Honey (2024), an intergenerational friendship between a young queer woman and her older roommate is layered and rich—one of the best representations of an older-younger friendship I’ve read. In Ellipses (2024), Vanessa Lawrence’s narrator falls into a confusing dynamic with an older girlboss who leads her on, tries to give her business advice, and taunts her via text for the entirety of the novel.

Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024) introduces us to Agatha, a 37-year-old white writing professor, and Millie, a 24-year-old Black resident assistant at the University of Arkansas. The two begin a torrid affair. In Anna Dorn’s Perfume and Pain (2024), a lesbian novelist pursues a relationship with an enigmatic artist 20 years her senior with Mommy energy. In her debut novel Please Stop Trying to Leave Me (2024), Alana Saab sets up dialogues between her protagonist and her new therapist, including ones that verge on maternal. In Knife River (2024), Justine Champine’s protagonist, Jess, loses herself in older women who take care of her. (At the book’s outset, she’s living with her dermatologist homeowner girlfriend in Queens; soon, though, she’s off to a remote corner of Upstate New York to revisit her mother’s murder.) In Mrs. S (2023), K. Patrick’s narrator falls for the headmaster’s wife, the beguiling Mrs. S, who is a bit of a Mean Mommy. A Good Happy Girl’s Helen, too, finds herself with “the wives” in a romantic dynamic that’s far from a one-way street. Helen seems to be what the wives want, or need: a supplicant, a lubricant, a willing victim.

Each of these narrators seeks care, but they’re in search of neglect too. Older lovers offer a cast with which to play out childhood scenes of care and neglect. Who better to do the work of abandonment and repair than Mommy?

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If it seems like Helen of A Good Happy Girl is trying to heal a specific wound—well, she is. The novel is set against the sinister backdrop: an 86-year-old “woman left to rot.” This is Helen’s paternal grandmother, whose care was in the hands of Helen’s now-jailed parents, selfish and troubled people whose abandonment and neglect touched Helen’s childhood deeply. When Helen’s grandmother is discovered, she has abscesses on her feet from sitting in her own excrement for weeks. When Helen goes to visit her grandmother in the nursing home where she has been placed to recuperate, the two play with dolls, dressing them in various outfits and fretting over their care. Both, it seems, are damaged, demented Mommies, struggling to reenact scenes of maternal comfort.

I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled. Mommy is an imaginary creature, one we reach for when looking for how to treat and care for each other.

For Helen, care is always tinged with brutality. Much of her inner world is occupied by speculation about what violent things might happen, fantasies about ripping out her lovers’ nose hairs and ramming hands into underwear, visions of the wives ripping out her spine and vertebrae. Sometimes she’s the assailant, and sometimes she’s the victim. The specificity of these brutalities feels almost compulsive—they’re presented neutrally, as fantasies that come and go for the narrator without much fanfare.

As they get to know each other, Helen issues a series of tests for the wives: What would you do if the heater toppled over, caught fire? What would you do if I inhaled propane? Peed my leggings? It’s never totally clear what she hopes they’ll say. Save her? Let her die? It’s probably both.

The wives’ attention—the details they remember about Helen, the ways she wants to be used and abused by them—is the thing that delights Helen most of all. If this all seems rather abject, it is. But A Good Happy Girl finds its footing early on: there is nothing warm and fuzzy, or particularly comforting, about anything the wives do to (or for) Helen. Unlike Melissa Broder’s funny and tender Milk Fed (2021), in which a woman with an eating disorder falls in love with a zaftig Orthodox Jewish ice cream scooper and gets sweetly mommied by her, forming a relationship tinged with care that approximates mother love and begins to patch up the Mother Wound. If Broder’s novel is about healing, Higgins’s is about Helen picking at the injury and seeing what she finds. Higgins’s novel is not about achieving any sort of comfort or serenity. Instead, it is keenly aware of the mundane violence that happens in intimate relationships—but more than that, it’s about a woman who doesn’t seem to want any of the warm-and-fuzzy caretaking on offer in other mommy-issues novels. By being mothered meanly, Helen’s issues come into focus.

A surface-level reading of A Good Happy Girl stops there: Helen seeks to play out her feelings about her parents with the wives (after all, she quite literally begs them to mother her meanly). But Higgins smartly diverts our expectations: what Helen wants isn’t simply to heal from her parents’ neglect but instead to punish herself for it. After all, Helen’s parents love each other and profess undying loyalty to each other yet continue to use Helen as a pawn, coercing her to write a false character reference to help get her father released from jail. Helen isn’t just a new member of the wives’ relationships; she’s a member of her parents’ relationship too. And it’s because of this that she fears she is tainted, undeserving of the wives’ care: “If I came from such stock, who was I if not a brimful of evil to be moved away from with careful steps?”

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Family abolition outlines the radical potential of rearranging traditional family structures—transcending old kinship models and actively imagining new ways of care and affection. In “Communizing Care,” M. E. O’Brien writes:

In place of the coercive system of atomized family units, the abolition of the family would generalize what we now call care. Care of mutual love and support; care of the labor of raising children and caring for the ill; care of erotic connection and pleasure; care of aiding each other in fulfilling the vast possibilities of our humanity, expressed in countless ways, including forms of self-expression we now call gender.

What would happen if we abolished Mommy? Do we want to? Or are we all really just looking for someone else to call the shots? To off-load the obligations and agonizing decisions and stupid quandaries of our unruly imaginations? In psychoanalysis, Mommy is the root of desire, pain, and, ultimately, imagination: Lacan identifies the moment at which we’re first denied our mother’s breast as the same one in which language is born.

If Mommy’s first refusal ushers in the birth of language and imagination—the ability to wonder why we’re being denied—then we also must contend with the ocean of projection that Mommy engenders. If Mommy is everything, the fertile wound from which language and imagination spring, what gets worked out for narrators who seek Mommies in queer relationships?

In All This Could Be Different (2022), Sarah Thankam Mathews explores what it actually takes to practice care: for self, for friends, for community. Attending to friendship and romantic partnership as equally complex and important relationships, Mathews avoids the blasé tone affected by other recent novels, entries into the “sad girl” canon that often feature a dry, ironic, and deadpan—and often, it should be said, hilarious, misunderstood, and wounded—narrator who makes increasingly ill-fated decisions, who is too dissociated to admit to caring about very much. But there’s a limit to what an ironic disposition can weather. Care is an earnest emotion, so much so that it’s synonymous, in its verb form, with attention, want, love. It’s active, not passive: care and its pursuit, its compromises, and its ethics require carefulness itself. In A Good Happy Girl, Helen cares, and cares so much that her desires take on an almost cartoonish sheen. She wants, more and more, to ratchet up the stakes and the emotions of normal life to unlikely degrees. To express care, to want care, to actually care. What if what we were to each other could transcend immediate recognition?

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Featured image: Edgar Degas. Woman Having Her Hair Combed, ca. 1886-88. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. (29.100.35). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed November 19, 2024. Image has been cropped.