Where I End by Sophie White

Published by Tramp Press 13th October 2022

Available from West End Lane Books and all good Bookshops

What They Say

My mother. At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her. Through our thin shared wall, I can hear the makings of my mother gurgle through her body just like the water in the walls of the house… Teenage Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is a wreckage, the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her young baby move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love.

What I Say

When the first line of a novel starts ‘ My mother. At night, my mother creaks’, you know that this book is certainly going to be nothing like you have read for a while!

In Where I End by Sophie White, we are introduced to Aoileann, a young woman who lives with her grandmother and bed bound mother in a remote cottage, where they can live their lives away from the curious and disgusted looks from the locals on the island. Aoileann’s mother is not from the island, but her father was. He is now only a monthly visitor to the island, and every day Aoileann and her grandmother are responsible for the daily care of her mother.

Let’s be clear from the start, that this is not a caring and loving relationship that exists within the walls of the crumbling and decrepit cottage. Aoileann’s mother has physically degenerated, and is referred to as ‘it’ or ‘bed thing’ by the women. They have a daily routine in place to care for her, and they rely on rope and winches to lift and move the mother to the bathroom where she is cleaned and to the kitchen where she is strapped in to eat, and back to her bedroom where she is stripped, cleaned and changed.

They resentfully clean her and change her nappies, hurl insults at her, talk over her and treat her in ways that are incredibly emotionally difficult to read. and make us aware of how inhumane they are in their treatment. We are given no explicit reason as to what happened to Aoileann’s mother or why, but all we are witness to is the incredible anger and resentment that both women – but especially Aoileann have towards her.

Aoileann’s daily life is punctuated by routine and thankless tasks, interspersed with taunting and humiliating her mother for the life she cannot have and the mother she cannot bond with. It is while scrubbing the floor of the cottage that she starts to see markings scratched on the floors where she realises that her mother has attempted to escape during the night, and when Aoileann writes them all down, she realises her mother has secrets and a past that that will slowly come to light which will impact her world in ways she cannot imagine.

Aoileann is treated with suspicion and malice by the islanders, and doesn’t interact with them. She has no friends and little time for herself. Her only respite is when she can escape to swim in the sea, away from the responsibilities and demands that caring for her mother brings.

It is when she is on the beach that she meets Rachel, an artist and single mother of a young baby that Aoileann finds herself immediately drawn to. Watching Rachel with her baby causes Aoileann to see the maternal connection that she has never had, the love that so many take for granted she has never experienced. She becomes fixated with Rachel and longs to be as important to her as her baby seems to be.

When the local wool factory is deemed by the mainlanders as ripe for redevelopment and investment, Aoileann’s grandmother is employed to collate her remembrances of the island, which means she now leaves Aoileann alone with her mother. Aoileann sees this as a way for her to spy on Rachel, to ingratiate herself into her lfe so that she will become indispensible to her, and this where the novel becomes even more unsettling as events spiral and twist in ways you cannot possibly imagine.

The world inhabited in Where I End is a finely balanced and yet all encompassing one. When you are reading the scenes set in the cottage, you feel how incredibly claustrophobic and exhausting the domestic sphere is, where everything is tightly controlled. Every day is centred around caring for the mother, with three women trapped in a world with no joy. Yet this is also balanced by the wildness and uncontrollable and mystical natural world of the island, that Aoileann yearns for, and the other residents who are grotesquely fascinated by Aoileann and her mother.

It is a novel that encompasses so many things. What it means to be a mother, the mother daughter relationship, duty, desire and anger too. In Aoileann, White has created a character who works so well because we are fascinated as to why she hates her mother, yet still cares for her. We see how Aoileann is desperate to love and be loved, but comes to hate her mother for the life she is forced to live.

Where I End is an incredibly layered and nuanced novel and White does not shy away from tackling challenging themes, and continually confronts the reader with events and interactions that are at times very difficult to read. At the heart of this novel is Aoileann and all the thoughts, feelings and emotions she has never been taught to express. We are witness to a young woman’s twisted logic as we come to understand she can only articulate what she wants in an increasingly destructive and horrific way as she finally decides to take control over her future.

I absolutely loved it.

Thank you so much to Sarah Davis-Goff and Tramp Press for my gifted proof copy.