The mother
A widowed French school headmistress whose determination, despair, favoritism, and financial losses shape the entire family.
In the narrator’s account, to rescue the family from financial ruin and force her children toward futures she can still believe in.
The book
At a glance
- Teacher and headmistress of a girls’ school in Sadec
- Widowed mother of two sons and a daughter
- A failed land purchase and years of legal disputes
- High school followed by a mathematics degree
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeThe narrator’s mother is a widowed teacher and headmistress in Sadec. She believes education can secure her daughter’s future and insists on mathematics before writing. Her salary is the main reliable income for a household that still tries to maintain the habits of a French colonial family.
A disastrous land purchase has consumed her savings and hope. She fights officials and repeatedly plans new futures for her children, then falls into periods of exhaustion and despair. The narrator remembers moments when her mother seems transformed or absent from herself, but the book does not provide a medical diagnosis.
Her love is powerful and damaging. She favors the elder son despite his violence, beats the narrator when she suspects the affair, and accepts the Chinese man’s money while sharing the family’s racist contempt for him. She can also defend her daughter before the boarding school and take delight in the girl’s defiance. None of these actions erases the others.
How the book draws them
- A working headmistressShe runs a girls’ school in Sadec and treats education as the practical route available to her daughter.
- Marked by the failed landThe unproductive property and her battles with officials become the family’s long financial disaster.
- Plans against despairShe keeps inventing courses, careers, houses, and recoveries. Planning gives shape to a future that repeatedly disappoints her.
- Protects the elder sonHer favoritism allows his violence to dominate the younger children and makes the narrator furious with both of them.
- Contradictory about the affairShe beats the girl and shares the family’s prejudice, yet also accepts the man’s money and persuades the school to stop enforcing ordinary limits.
- Loved without being idealizedThe narrator’s attention moves between tenderness, blame, pity, fear, and admiration. The mother remains central because no single feeling explains her.
When the family suspects the affair, the mother beats the girl while the elder brother listens outside the room. Later she persuades the boarding school to allow her daughter unusual freedom. Her response never settles into either approval or prohibition.
She leaves Indochina for France with the narrator and younger brother. The book later remembers her meeting the Chinese man again in Saigon and telling him that the narrator has become a writer. Her life remains joined to the affair long after she failed to stop it.
If you like The Lover
If you like Marguerite Duras
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Martha Gellhorn
War correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War, D-Day, and conflicts across five more decades; Hemingway's third wife, 1940–1945.
View author
Ernest Hemingway
Author of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast; his pared-down style, developed in 1920s Paris, became the most imitated in American prose.
View author
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
View author