Book Review: "Postmortem" by Laurel Saville

Title: Postmortem

Author: Laurel Saville

Publisher: iUniverse, Inc.

ISBN, PUB Date: 978-1-4401-6107-0, September 2009

Reviewed By: Joan Hanna for Author Exposure

 

“My mother was murdered.

No matter how many times I say this, no matter how many people I tell, the strangeness of this sentence never changes. My tongue feels thick around the words, even though, after years of practice, they come out smoothly. I try not to watch the person who hears this piece of unexpected bad news. But I do ... I watch and wonder what they are thinking, of me and of who my mother was or might have been.” (ix)

When you first read this in the prologue, you think Postmortem by Laurel Saville is going to be a murder mystery in which she discovers facts about how and why her mother was murdered. What you get instead is a portrait of Lolly (as her mother called her), a young girl trying to untangle herself from the overshadowing image of her larger than life mother. Her mother, Anne Ford, an artist and clothing designer, is caught in the counterculture of the 1960’s. She alternately neglects, emotionally abuses, and subjects her children not only to her own self-indulgency, but also that of the men she invites into her life, home, and, ultimately, the lives of her children. Saville gives us an alternate look into this counterculture as seen through the eyes of the children who were subjected to a no rules, no inhibitions attitude and treated as if they were equal participants, when in fact, they were not. This story reveals how the lives of not only the daughter, but brothers, father, grandmother and other members of the family were affected by a diagnosed “schizophrenogenic” (176) mother.

Saville begins this story with a questioning, timid voice overwhelmed by the death and daunting task of looking back through her childhood. But what begins to emerge is the strong voice of a survivor. Saville has managed to let the reader see how enchanting her mother must have seemed to the outside world. At first glance, Anne Ford is a beautiful, sexy, uninhibited woman. But, she is also a woman who is sadistic, self-involved and emotionally neglectful of nearly everyone around her. Her daughter, Lolly, simply cannot win. She could never do anything as well as her mother because her mother simply couldn’t stand the competition. Lolly is constantly told that she doesn’t measure up because she is not as pretty, not as smart and not as exciting as her mother.

“It was a point of pride with her, as she saw herself as terminally persecuted and misunderstood by people who were ‘uptight.’

To her, I was one of those people. From earliest childhood, my personality was an affront to her and her way of life. She called me a ‘drag’ and a ‘bore.’ Among other, harsher, viler things.” (7)

As Seville unravels the self-destructive path of her mother, she also reveals the growing strength and self-determination of herself. This is a story of a young girl’s survival within the obstructed view of the world, amid the narcissistic binges and self-absorption of a mother who depended on her children to know the things she hadn’t taught them.

“I didn’t know what to do to find her keys, fix her boss, make time move backward so she wouldn’t have woken up late, she wouldn’t have stayed up late, she wouldn’t have ended up a single mother juggling three kids and a job and a house without the help of a nanny, a man, an occasional child support payment, or the star status that all the accomplishments of her youth had seemed to guarantee.” (59)

Saville gives her readers everything in Postmortem--the mother’s story, the daughter’s story and every story in-between the cracks in the foundation of this broken family. This is not the voice of someone indulging her present because of her past. She not only survives her childhood, she does so with a grace that is self-taught and self-nurturing. The reader finds a woman that ponders where we come from, how we get where we are and all of the crossroads in-between.