Q: I don’t know how to manage my relationship with my mother. Can you recommend any books, fiction or nonfiction, which deal with fraught mother-and-daughter bonds?
Anonymous, 40, Buckinghamshire

A: Kate Kellaway, Observer writer and critic, says:
Reading about dysfunctional mother/daughter relationships can be soothing when struggling with a difficult relationship of your own.

Naomi Wolf once declared: “A mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance actually vaccinates her daughter against low self-esteem”, but you have only to meet the mother in Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time to see this idea flounder. The mother, a more-politically-correct-than-thou type, undermines her daughter at every turn.

Even more damaging is the mother in Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, a creepily unsustaining parent who shows up at her daughter’s hospital bedside.

Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk is a bracing nightcap of a read – about a daughter who takes her paralysed mother to Spain; there are no quick fixes when in a fix with your mother.

I would also suggest that you rewind to childhood and to Babette Cole’s uplifting picture book: The Trouble With Mum. Mum has wacky taste in millinery and turns out to be a witch – tricky but finally a good thing (put that in your cauldron and stir it).

And finally, get a copy of Anoushka Warden’s play about growing up with a mother who joined a cult: My Mum’s a Twat. Reading this might even make you decide to write about your own mother.

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