My Evil Mother

A short story that isn’t about a bad mother, rather it’s about a mother who is a witch. Or is she? Throughout this slim book, we’re not sure if the mother is telling the truth or if she is telling fibs to make her daughter feel protected.

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I didn’t care about being respected—that was a schoolteacher thing, like black lace-up shoes—but I very much wanted to be liked. My mother frequently said I’d have to give up that frivolous desire if I was going to amount to anything. She said that wanting to be liked was a weakness of character.

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Told in a circular way beginning with a 15-year-old girl and her mother and ending with a 15-year-old girl and her mother, there is a third character that makes or breaks the story being told from one generation to the next.

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Four hundred years ago, give or take, they’d begun to have battles in the air at night. Not on brooms, she added: that cliché about flying brooms was just a superstition. Then Miss Scace had ratted my mother out to the authorities for witchcraft, and the outcome had been fiery, and then terminal.

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The tone of the writing is pure Atwood. There is a confidence to the prose and a sense that she is grinning mischievously while writing that I really like. This story only 32 pages, takes about 45 minutes to read, and costs less than two dollars/euros to read it on the Kindle. Totally worth it for the humor and good advice.

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