Ainslie Hogarth – Cheltenham Literature Festival

The Motherload

Mothers can be tricky things. In major Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead? the estrangement between mother and daughter has been so long and acrimonious that the now-middle aged daughter must discover whether her mother is even still alive when she finally returns to her home-town. A darkly funny, and sometimes shocking, cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torture ensues. The idea of an intrusive mother-in-law reaches new heights in Canadian Anslie Hogarth’s Motherthing when a young wife is haunted by her husband’s mother’s vengeful ghost in her dark, black-humour filled novel. They talk to Clare Clark.