Bad Art Mother by Edwina Preston
“Good mothers are expected to be selfless. Artists are seen as selfish. So what does this mean for a mother with artistic ambitions?”
Bad Art Mother (2022) can be summed up by this very simple question: one that Edwina Preston answers with commendable honesty and nuance, transforming a polarising topic into an absorbing, exceptional, fully original novel.
Set in the 1960s, the characters of Bad Art Mother are loosely based on well-known Melbourne identities from the mid-20th century – artists, thinkers, writers and poets, both men and increasingly women, who formed and were formed by the modernist period in Australia. Against the backdrop of this bohemian milieu emerges the life of Veda Gray, her husband Jo, and their son Owen.
Veda, an aspiring poet set on reaching literary prowess and national recognition as an artist, finds herself in the role of housewife and mother somewhat accidentally and much to her dislike. What starts out as a genuine connection with a young cook named Jo becomes an idyllic-seeming set-up to any 1960s household – father at work, mother at home with the child. However, Veda’s ambitions and hopes of getting published are growing by the day. When a wealthy, childless couple offer to take young Owen off her hands each weekend so she can write, she – reluctantly, fatefully – agrees, but not without questioning the morality of it herself. After all, “what sort of a mother chooses a book over a child?”
What follows is a childhood spent between different homes, a poet’s struggle to find her voice, and a beautiful mediation on life as a female artist with all its idiosyncrasies, nuances and baffling complexities.
Structurally, Bad Art Mother is made up of adult Owen’s recollection of his childhood, as well as Veda’s letters to her sister Tilde. By choosing to incorporate both perspectives in such a creative way, Preston allows us to glimpse two sides of the very same coin: the challenges and barriers faced by a mother with artistic ambition attempting to make it in a male-dominated world, as well as the experiences of a young child growing up in the Melbourne suburbs, coveting love in all the ways he’s not getting it. As such, Bad Art Mother gives no preference to either side: both can be true, at the same time.
Veda’s one-sided letters offer a rich insight into the inner workings of not only an artist’s, but a mother’s, mind. Her most trusted confidant, Tilde, receives the very best and the very worst of Veda. In these musings, Veda reflects on her shortcomings as a mother, her work as a poet, and the limitations of both life at home and in the male-dominated art world. She finds it difficult to marry up the two, a sentiment that results in art that is seen as too feminine, and mothering that is seen as not feminine enough.
“I have been toying with calling my first collection of poetry 'The Housewife's Lament'. Only then nobody but housewives will buy it. That is the shame – only housewives listen to housewives and no one cares what housewives think.”
As an artist, it’s obvious that Veda is a connoisseur of words, an exceptional poet when her poetry is realised, but she is weighed down by a lot of things stacked against her: her marriage to well-meaning but absent Jo, her responsibilities as the mother of Owen, her role as a housewife, and even the very fact of her sex. Owen comes to understand this as he embarks on a relationship with the posthumous publisher of Veda’s work, Julia.
“Veda Gray, says Julia, had the ambition but not the resources to further it. She had the intelligence but not the requisite belief in her intelligence. She had the talent, but not the right temperament. She had the talent (so says Julia) but not the right sex.”
Owen’s reflections on his mother’s life and his own childhood are told with a raw pain (and with the help of Julia), a present understanding that nevertheless does not negate the negative experiences of the past. At one point, Owen recalls seeing Veda passed out on the couch upon returning from school, embarrassed that he doesn’t have the reliable, normal mother his schoolmates have. While this instance does not stand out in any way from what he is used to, this one episode imprints heavily on his mind.
“I moved the stylus off the record in the way she'd shown me, and then I felt like I was going to be sick, so I went outside and peeled some bark off the paperbark tree and listened to cars go up and down the street. I hate you I hate you I hate you, I said into the tree trunk, but I may as well have said, I love you I love you I love you. It would've been just the same, and just as awful.”
Owen’s sentiments and emotions form an integral, beautiful part of Bad Art Mother – as an inquisitive, quiet, obedient child, it’s often only in his musings that his personality gets to shine. Not knowing any different, he goes from house to house, from mother to different mother figures, all the while trying to understand his own position in all of it. Surrounded by successful men and by talented if unsuccessful women, Owen grows into himself slowly, a metamorphosis that chips away at external influences and the many opinions that surround him. But at the end of the day, it is his relationship with his mother that makes him who he is, for better or worse.
In another vignette, he recalls the parents of a fellow student making cupcakes for a school fete or running after-school soccer training. He reflects on the absence of Veda in this sense:
“Veda didn't do things like that. I was glad she didn't, and I was disappointed she didn't. That's how it was: I was spared and I was ashamed, both at the same time.”
This duality forms the very basis of Bad Art Mother, as well as the foundational problems of artistry in motherhood. What one deserves (the space and opportunity to express themselves creatively; the unconditional, unwavering love of a parent), often has its own consequences when realised or neglected, and Preston writes about these with authenticity, thoughtfulness, and just the perfect amount of tragedy.
Bad Art Mother, while posing one very important question, actually opens the door to many different discussions: about the role of female artists in modernism, and the art world at large; the synergy of motherhood and ambition; the many small things that make up a child and a childhood; but most of all the definition of love. There’s a reason Bad Art Mother made the Stella Prize 2023 shortlist – and I cannot recommend it enough.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer and book reviewer from Hungary, currently residing in Naarm/Melbourne. She has been a reader all her life, and she finds unexplainable joy in forcing literary revelations into the hands of friends, family, and strangers. When she's not reading or writing, she likes to even out her nerdy side by doing martial arts or going for hikes. You can find her online at fruzsinagal.com.