Where You End and I Begin

Starred review from May 30, 2022
A mother’s fraught history prompts an intelligent and affecting interrogation of generational trauma in the magnificent latest from McLaren (A Better Man). When a teenage McLaren was raped by a friend, her mother, Cecily, confided in her about her own history of abuse: as a 12-year-old, she was groomed and raped by her horseback riding instructor, referred to here only as the Horseman. The abuse continued for several years and would reverberate through both Cecily and McLaren’s lives—as McLaren’s therapist explained, “ can be... passed down. Especially between mothers and daughters who lack boundaries.” Cecily took pride in being a best friend rather than a mother to McLaren—openly discussing her sex life and leaving McLaren to take care of herself in their bustling household. McLaren, meanwhile, remained fascinated by the specter of the Horseman on their lives: “The story of the Horseman had become something else—a story that was my mother’s but also indisputably mine. In that story, my story, there were no obvious victims or predators, just a mother and a daughter trying and failing to love each other.” As McLaren untangles their complicated bond, she offers an unconventional meditation on consent, love, and motherhood that’s imbued with radical compassion when McLaren later becomes a mother herself. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrayal of family ties at their most complex and beautiful.

July 15, 2022
In the process of writing a book about her mother's stories of her childhood trauma, the author found herself in a tussle over who owns the story. "In my mother's narrative of our lives," writes McLaren, "the one I accepted and understood, the Horseman was both the clue and the final reveal. He was the keystone in the arch, the signature at the bottom of every page. As Homer Simpson once observed of beer, the Horseman was the cause of and solution to all of life's problems." The author describes how she wanted to use her mother's stories of abuse, starting at the age of 12, by her riding teacher, the Horseman, as material for a memoir, a project on which her mother, also a writer, had agreed to collaborate, according to McLaren. However, once the book was sold and the manuscript begun, her mother, Cecily Ross, withdrew her permission, deciding to keep the story for her own use, the author says. Rather than comply, McLaren chose to weave the unfolding conflict into the narrative, including the fact that her mother beat her to print with a 2020 essay in the Literary Review of Canada aggressively titled "This Story Is Mine." Her daughter disagrees. "Stories are like children," she writes, "and children are like barn fires....Go ahead, toss a match in the hay. After that the thing will live and breathe. It will go where it wants. You cannot pretend to own it any more than you can control it." In the end, McLaren took a compromise position, minimizing the Horseman material and centering the mother-daughter relationship and other stories about her childhood--from a cruel game she played with her little sister to the pitched battles she fought with her stepmother to what seems like an early discovery of microdosing when she was in high school: "I spend my school days in a blur, snacking from the bottomless ziplock bag of magical fungus....Taken in small quantities, mushrooms lift my spirits." A lot of good writing in search of a story with some juice left in it.

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August 2, 2022
From the ages of 12 to 15, the author's mother was sexually abused by her riding instructor, a married man and shadowy figure whom she'd later refer to in stories as the Horseman. What begins as a collaboration between journalist and novelist McLaren (A Better Man, 2015) and her mother to track down and expose the Horseman and hold him accountable expands and deepens to become, instead, an engrossing memoir of the author's troubled relationship with her mother. Throughout her life, McLaren craves boundaries, but finds herself in a constant state of enmeshment with her capricious mother, playing the role of sister, confidant, best friend, therapist: anything but the straightforward role she craves--daughter. Readers will be fascinated by this richly detailed yet never sensationalized account that serves to illustrate the many ways trauma can cast a shadow over a family for generations. McLaren has a difficult story to share, and she does it with kindness and clear-eyed forgiveness.

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