Mother's Mother

A hybrid memoir tracing maternal inheritance, social mobility and women’s lives across generations in the Scottish Lowlands.

Beginning with a peony bush passed down through generations of women in her family, Kirsty Bell's Mother’s Mother is a hybrid memoir of matriarchal inheritance. The realization that she is the final woman in her maternal line compels her to trace the faint yet persistent currents that flow between past and present. Spanning a century and a half, the lives of her grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother in the Scottish Lowlands reveal a family past shaped by poverty, class mobility and global upheaval. Bell weaves these personal narratives with social history, archival traces and literary forebears – from Mary Shelley to Muriel Spark – to offer a richly textured meditation on the regulation of women’s bodies and the silencing of their voices across generations. Written in fluid prose that reaches beyond family history to the collective, Mother’s Mother is an erudite and moving work about the near-impossible task of recovering past lives while asking what, of them, endures within us.