Love, Mom

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and cursing.

Throughout the novel, the main female characters struggle with complex grief and trauma, which not only shapes their internal worlds but also affects their relationships and creative expression. Mackenzie’s journey of discovery after her mother’s death shows that grief can take many forms. At the same time, Elizabeth’s diary entries reveal a close relationship between trauma and creativity. In the opening chapters of Love, Mom, Mackenzie struggles to identify her grief after the death of the woman she believes is her mother. Ironically, it is only after Mackenzie realizes that the dead woman is Tonya, and not her mother Elizabeth, that she can fully feel her grief. Mackenzie imagines her grief as “a monster that grows teeth [and] claws, scratching at [her] heart, making it bleed” (281). The image of an actively growing monster demonstrates that grief is a constantly changing entity that can attack at any moment. Mackenzie’s response to her grief is complicated. She feels a “helplessness so profound that [she] want[s] to scream and lash out and break things and yell” (240). The paradox of a helplessness that causes her to lash out highlights that Mackenzie’s grief is complicated and can take many forms simultaneously.