Book Review | Hanna Brotherus’ second book is an embarrassing read

Culture|Book review

Novel

Hanna Brotherus: For my life. WSOY. 283 pp.

Must admit that this book is not for me. I don’t like its expression, I don’t understand its main character’s problems as a mother and a woman. This would be passable if the book were good fiction, but it isn’t.

Choreographer Hanna Brotherus another book For my life deals with the problem of an empty nest, the feeling of loneliness and body changes in the life of a middle-aged woman through an intense self-narrative:

“I limit my privacy in my mind and search for the last lost chapters of my life’s script. The thought of a granny whoring on nothing is unbearable.”

The narrator resembles the author in so many ways that the distinction between fiction and memoir does not seem to be necessary. The book itself does not claim to be a novel, auto-fiction or overly autobiographical text. The library category is 84.2, “Finnish narrative literature”.

For my life is inevitably also the confessional prose of a public figure. As such, it creates an image of Brotherus and his close circle.

Based on the interviews, the goal of writing has been self-knowledge, and that’s what the result really looks like. In general, therapeutic writing is also not published in such a raw form, which makes one wonder about the publisher’s motivation.

In the book, a woman thinks and feels. Mostly she thinks about her family and feels herself primarily as a mother.

The connection to the family and the women in the family, female friends and one’s own female body come to the surface in the narration. Grief work due to the death of a sister makes its own mark.

Interesting are the occasional specific observations about the body, which can really only be done by a person for whom their own body is a work tool – such as someone who works in dance. I would have read more about joint movements under the skin.

Metaphorically the butterflies that the narrator has caught as a child serve as a level. He takes them with him from the family’s cabin and invents a purpose for them. Of course, in the book, a butterfly emerges from the caterpillar, an old symbol of new birth and resurrection.

For my life also describes his mental process as comprehensible as possible:

“I have lived one life from childhood to adulthood. The second life started with the first pregnancy and ended with the youngest child moving out of our home. The third life has just begun.”

Despite the fact that motherhood, womanhood, children moving away from home are not foreign things to me either, this narrator’s total, existentially feminine motherhood is completely foreign. The myth of the mother swells but does not burst, and turns into the myth of the woman who stretches but does not resolve.

Of course, the crisis is followed by empowerment, in the form of women’s solidarity. The therapy ends, the woman finds her place in her third life.

Relatability is a matter of which both For my life that Brotherus’ best-selling firstborn, My only homehas been praised.

It’s not at all rare that I don’t identify with the characters or the narrator in a book. It is rare that it interferes with reading.

I’m waiting for something out of the box. Let there be a strange twist or an idea that is strange, imaginative, fantastic. Even if a character starts to crawl on the wall paper, if the injected butterflies come to life, even if Deus ex machina descends on strings.

I wish you could find some ugly guy in the attic of the cottage. I wish there would be an air hole between the dense gender division of the work.

Anything to get me out of the cocoon as a reader, even if I was condemned to be a caterpillar.

Because for word art the essential level of alienation is missing, the central character is not interesting but awkward. If the book is autofiction, it’s exactly the thinnest kind: a story about my troubles to my triumph.

The worst of the problems is the level of linguistic thinking. For my life offers moments of reflection and insights for the needs of more than one life: “Isn’t a person different in the eyes of every viewer?” or “It is enough that I am and I spread the cards of the memory game of my life on the table” or “Feminine pleasure springs from the contradiction of the pain and beauty produced by the stings”.

Such sentences make the text banal, although the purpose is probably something other than frantically spouting clichés.

For my life may very well be psychologically or experientially valuable for the reader, it may appeal to those who are aging, grieving or those who are struggling with motherhood. But the work is always more than the subject. Because For my life there are just words between the covers.

Read more: Stressing about appearance and control actions related to eating are passed down from mother to daughter in Hanna Brotherus’ novel