Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling

A striking memoir that travels through a traumatic childhood with an abusive mother.

In this extraordinary memoir, Gwyneth Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales, recounts her toxic upbringing at the hands of her controlling, coercive mother. It is a book that Gwyneth has been preparing to write all her life, in diaries that she’s kept since childhood. In these journals, she interrogates the emotionally abusive mother/daughter relationship, in great pain but with determination to find a way through.

The result is a book that Gwyneth co-writes with her younger self, an unexpected and life-saving dialogue through time. Metaphors of haunting intensity help her confront what happened to her; quotations from art and literature help to guide and steady her. Nightshade Mother is a book about the power of art and language and, ultimately, about homecoming after a lifetime of exile from herself. It is a profoundly moving and beautiful work; questing, forgiving, and loving in its approach.

All Gwyneth Lewis ever wanted to be was a writer. Brought up Welsh-speaking in Cardiff, she studied English and spent time in America. She was Wales’s first National Poet and composed the six-foot-high words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre. Her nonfiction books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage. She has published nine books of poetry, the latest being Sparrow Tree.