‘Girl Talk’ describes unique bond between mothers, daughters

All Things Literary

Have you often thought that you’ll never be like your mother when you grow up? That her mistakes, her mannerisms and her nature will never rub off on you? I know I’ve had those thoughts before. Yet, there is an undeniable force — an almost indescribable bond — between mothers and daughters that will never allow this to be true. After reading Julianna Baggott’s "Girl Talk," I understand this now more than ever.

In the summer of 1985, Lissy Jablonksi is 15 years old when her mild-mannered father abruptly walks away from the family to run off with a young bank teller. In a remarkably calm fashion, Lissy’s mother packs up the car and takes Lissy away from their New Hampshire residence to her small New Jersey hometown, on a mission to introduce Lissy to her past.

Along the way, their late-night girl-talk sessions — usually nothing more than mindless gossip before — transition into serious, revealing conversations that Lissy never could have anticipated. Most importantly, Lissy discovers that the man she believed to be her father actually was not.

Fast-forward 15 years, when Lissy is an unmarried and newly pregnant advertising executive in New York. Her baby’s father is an older, married man who seemingly wants nothing to do with her. Looking back on the summer of revelation 15 years ago, Lissy realizes she is now standing in her mother’s shoes more than she ever has before.

What is so convincing about Lissy ending up in the same position as her mother 30 years earlier was that Baggott astutely showed the progression and formation of her mother’s world as molded by the eccentric characters in her New Jersey town, the same town that Lissy would later experience that fateful summer.

So that leads me to this question — are we destined to live the lives our mothers did?

Yes and no. There’s no denying it — we are creatures of our environment. Obviously, we are shaped by what we are exposed to, the people we meet and the places we see. But initially, our mothers are our outlet to the world and the interpreters of what we were still too young to understand.

It took Lissy 30 years to understand this, but she did. You are more like your mother than you probably will ever appreciate. The insight that Lissy’s mother gave her into the ways of the world was eye-opening, but also eye-opening in the sense that I could see that following in your mother’s footsteps, for better or worse, is not necessarily a bad thing.

Though it may not be glaringly obvious, there is a sense of comfort in the solidarity and similarity of experiencing life partially through the eyes of your mother. Growing up is hard enough — the knowledge that someone else has the capacity to understand what you’re going through is undeniably reassuring, and this book offered just that.