More about my mother: Elaine, by Will Self, reviewed

Inspired by his late mother’s diaries, Will Self’s fictionalised Elaine covers just over a year in the life of its titular character. Elaine Hancock is a trailing wife living in upstate New York, where her husband, John, teaches English at Cornell.

Zigzagging chronologically, the novel takes place in the mid-1950s – more than a decade before Self lived in Ithaca with his parents, who then separated. He portrays it as a loose time at the faculty: the Hancocks display a ‘masochistic intimacy’ by swapping notes about the people they’ve drunkenly ‘necked’ during evenings out. Disdainful of her husband (‘a milquetoast man who doesn’t know how to make love properly’), Elaine flirts with extramarital affairs but mostly indulges in a rich fantasy life. She tends to fall for ‘difficult, screwy guys’, and when rebuffed ‘[dogs] these men’s footsteps as they try to escape her clutches’.

Elaine assists John, who is gunning for promotion and a Fulbright, by typing and editing his manuscripts on Milton. Having studied under Ted Roethke at Penn State, she also aspires to write, but considers her work ‘nonviable… as some obstetrician might say of an embryo’. She asks for advice from Vladimir Nabokov, who makes a cameo appearance on campus. The ‘balding old coot’, as Elaine refers to him, suggests she ‘paint the bars of [her] own cage’. Instead, she burns her journals and finds herself hemmed in by housework. ‘Is this it?’ she howls aloud.

Elaine suffers from migraines and ‘postpartum neurosis’, which manifests as panic attacks that psychoanalysis has failed to cure. Her erratic moods sometimes culminate in violence towards her son, filling her with shame. ‘On the verge of girl-hating puberty,’ Billy – an only child in the book – is precocious.