Where I End

Product Information

When the first line of a novel starts ‘ My mother. At night, my mother creaks’, you know that this book is certainly going to be nothing like you have read for a while! The only giveaway in My Hot Friend would be the searing honesty, and White’s astounding ability to chase down the uncomfortable and disturbing truths of living and painstakingly examine them.

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. A small and well-defined central cast of characters held sway over this story, with their dour and brooding persona and aura of impending doom. They were all pretty uncompelling, disturbing, loathsome individuals, and not one of them did I have any real empathy with, or sympathy for. Yes! They were definitely given a strong voice with which to tell their story, however it got to the stage where I simply couldn’t trust a single word which came out of any of their mouths! At best they were complex, volatile and unreliable, at their worst they were manipulative, duplicitous and malevolent. Every time I had the slightest urge to feel even slightly sorry for any one of them, within seconds they had said or done something else to have me seething and truly angry with them, all over again. A cast of ‘extras’ were alluded to, but thankfully didn’t appear in any important capacity, as I don’t think I could have stood the strain.She’s also been learning to pole dance and roller skate, endeavours which are “massively good for slowing me down a bit, making me be more in the moment and trying not to think a million miles an hour.” It’s funny because I do think when women write about their lives, people worry about their children.” (White and her husband Seb have three young sons, Roo, Ari and Sonny). “I don’t know if they worry about the children of male writers. But I do think it’s just always more transgressive, or more taboo, for a mother to write honestly about motherhood and her experiences.” Linking the two is Lexi, the co-host of a Call Me Daddy-esque podcast, Your Hot Friend, which Claire and Joanne’s partner Bert both devour. Lexi is the sensible foil to co-host Amanda, who is referred to as "the female Joe Rogan" in a magazine write-up. 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.

By the time the first census was recorded, the mainlanders had settled on more ho-hum aversion: the islanders were ugly; they were poor; their Irish was incomprehensible. In spring 1931, the island was home to 187 souls. About ten families, all fishing and living a spartan existence. The world inhabited in Where I End is a finely balanced and yet all encompassing one. When you are reading the scenes set in the cottage, you feel how incredibly claustrophobic and exhausting the domestic sphere is, where everything is tightly controlled. Every day is centred around caring for the mother, with three women trapped in a world with no joy. Yet this is also balanced by the wildness and uncontrollable and mystical natural world of the island, that Aoileann yearns for, and the other residents who are grotesquely fascinated by Aoileann and her mother. The geography of the island in Where I End is kind of an outsized version of what Inis Meáin is like,” she says. “It’s got a really beautiful sandy beach at one end, and at the other end are these absolutely desolate sheer cliffs.” Indeed Aoileann typically refers to her as 'the bed-thing' rather than as her mother, and her story sets out in stomach-turning mechanical detail the procedures she and her grandmother go through to keep the 'bed-thing' alive:A few of the missing appear to correspond to ‘graves’ and testimony from islanders claiming to be surviving family, would it seem, corroborate this. However, there are at least seven others entirely unaccounted for. The mother is a figure of pain, caught in a constant state of decay and self-destruction. She’s even stripped of her personhood. It brought to mind the exploration of masculinity and destruction explored in The Banshees of Inisherin and that particular plot twist – though we’ll leave it there for the sake of avoiding spoilers. This book is fantastic in creepy setting and horrific situations, that are desperately sad and brutal all at the same time. The isolated island life, especially experienced through someone even further ostracised, was done so well and there were times I didn't know whether to hate the islanders for their ways or pity them. 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.