FAILING LOUDLY

Am I doing 21 wrong? (Mostly on my mother and my failure as a daughter.)

Disclaimer: I fear this will not be a good essay. I fear it will be childish. If it ends up making you laugh, this laughter will invariably come out of all the wrong reasons, and you will be laughing AT me and my ridiculous efforts here rather than with me—and for an essayist this is probably a fate worse than death.

It reminds me of that exchange in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945; a well-thumbed book on my shelves) where the main character, bona fide beautiful boy turned alcoholic, Sebastian Flyte exclaims: "If they treat me like a dipsomaniac, they can all bloody well have a dipsomaniac." I say to the world with throaty madness, renouncing all my former pretensions to writing serious essays: ‘If they treat me like a girl who writes girlhood essays online, they can HAVE a girlhood essay!’ Cabaret music ensues; feathers and spangles and gaseous 1920s spotlights; the works; the old razzle-dazzle and all her hangers-on.

You see, reader: briefly after my break-up I decided I was going to do my best to appear as a smart girl who wrote prodigiously about smart, informed things like politics. My ex, lovely as he is, was always bemusedly surprised when I knew about politicians. Even when I could do so much as identify them! Good girl, Alice, very clever! The sort of praise you direct towards a very young and mostly unpromising child. I suppose in real life I come across as quite ditsy. Quiet and subservient, usually dressed in something with a floral print, impressively milquetoast. Thus when I would level a comment on something even quite generically political, perhaps the whole affair was as though a show-pony had been asked to sub in and pull a plough as a favour for one of the burlier horses—and had, to everyone’s shock, managed the task quite satisfactorily. (Assuredly I still want to do write about these hardier topics; in fact ideally I’d like to make an academic or journalistic career out of this. The lady’s not for turning—except now, just in passing, when I feel I must write like an overgrown teenager and wallow in self-pity awhile.)

Yes. In the meantime, Substack beckons. It is of course that great platform of white girlhood. A transatlantic commodity, beautiful for so unspoilt: Americana vestals shake hands with the royal families of British suburbia and all their favourite daughters. Perfect paparazzi’s photo op: all these gorgeous belladonna youths writing on one platform, circulating their musings whilst older aunts and mothers applaud, whilst young-ish male English teachers timidly watch from afar. Substack is where young debutantes come to make their splash. To be sized up and ogled and write something pleasingly almost-poetic on the manifold tribulations of being sixteen through thirty.

And do you know what? For all my convictions that I am if not smart, I am at least well-educated, I am not sure I can stop avoiding the inavoidable fact of my being a STUPID twenty-one year old girl any longer. Or not girl; perhaps woman?—What you will; however you would have me! Order the steak overdone or rare as it lay on the abattoir and it will thus be cooked for you. (I prefer ‘girl’; why is that?)

I have tried to stop (with varying degrees of success, granted) this hampering part of my identity from leaching into my writing. But after all, when it comes down to it, I am indeed a stupid girl preoccupied with quotidian things. Such as the fact that I really miss barista-style oat milk in my coffee but I’ve made the executive decision to switch to dairy milk. This is because the Internet and its motley brigand of doctors (those of the quack and genuine variety), outfitted with their dazzling and believable cant, have made me afraid of seed oils. The absence of this slightly malted, sweet-tasting oat milk has actually markedly worsened my daily life, but I suppose it is for the best. Anyway.

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Growing up. It didn’t really happen all at once or overnight, not even when I paid my first quarterly round of council tax. There was no neat conferral of adulthood upon my meek shoulders. Not like a bat mitzvah; not something tidy. It was more chaptered. Sequential. This and then that, and then this, and then that. And then all these scenes melded together as though they formed one script. And flipping through the script’s pages, with its sloppily judged dramaturgy, you could see that I had grown properly into twenty-one. Twenty had just been the second part of nineteen. Nineteen, in turn, had simply been the logical continuation of eighteen (just occasionally funnier and slightly less abominably shy).

The taste of twenty-one is just so much more bitter. If it were a blueberry which you had given to a particularly expressive toddler, they’d pout and stick their tongue out. Unlike nature’s typical process of ripening, ironically the older I have become, the less sweet the fruit. Actually, it’s rather like I’m not ripening at all. I must have just run bad in the bud. Sour pickings.

For shameful reasons best known to myself (I’m a blabber-mouth—read: I lost my job), I have come home—home home, as they say, whether or not the self-important-seeming inflection is deserved. Where you grew up, that home. It had been two and a half months since I last lay on my loft bed with my mum on the bed below; she still awake, reading.

We started sharing a bedroom after we moved house when I was seven. We moved from a two-bedroom ground-floor flat to a one-bedroom flat above her shop. I never thought about it then—how difficult it must have been to suddenly relinquish all her personal space and begin sharing a bedroom with a growing-up girl. How difficult it must be now, too, that I have come home with my tail between my legs and reclaimed the space. Space which she had thought was now fully her own, me having moved out.

She always used to ask, as I would clamber up the ladder to my bed and burrow in under the covers, if it were okay to keep the light on awhile. Perseveringly attentive. When I was little, she would put me to bed long before she went to bed, and only very seldom would I wake up when she switched the light back on to read. But ever since I reached my teens, I fall asleep to the rustle of book pages. There were also the nights I stayed up longer than her. Usually to message people into the small hours: once a best friend dealing with anorexia, once a poet-boy I knew online briefly, usually my close-knit group-chat. Those nights I would usually perch in the bathtub or at the tiny breakfast-bar in our kitchen so as not to wake her with the clackety rhythms of my typing nor the rude glare of my phone screen. The living-room was not possible to use since it happens to shelter my father, who has slept on the sofa since I was about six. Sometimes my cat sleeps in there too: one beady green eye open, his ears nicked with the battle-scars of years of fool-hardy encounters and back-alley vainglories, swish of the black tail and scrunch of the nose. Do not get me started on my cat. No cat has done less for its owners (he once walked out on us for two whole years and did not even think to call)—and yet no person has loved a cat as well as my mother loves him. Once in my office job I declared that some cats were treated better than some children in the world. One colleague took severe umbrage to this and retorted that her little daughter was definitely looked after better than her cats were. But she missed my point. Of course this was true, and I did not deny this: her lovely and undeniably middle-class daughter is being raised with the utmost care and she is a brilliant mother. Regardless, there are still child-slaves dying unfed and abused out in the world whilst house-cats are fattened on choice salmon terrines, pampered and groomed and kept warm. More to the point: a study from 2022 authored by the Co-operative Society discovered that people in the United Kingdom spend up to £873 million on Christmas presents for their PETS each year.¹ I do not think a pet could care less about receiving a present or not. This practice is not sweet and sentimental; it is wasteful.

But yes—privacy was non-existent in our home. There was no space which was properly hers. Not even the bedside table which she converted into her dressing table, poised like a loyal steed by the only window in the room. By which I mean, atop it she set a bronze mirror and a big teal box with faded flowers printed onto it, which contained sleeping pills and nail files and other things I puzzled over the one time I curiously rummaged through it—which I definitely oughtn’t have done! And there was all her makeup. A patisserie-counter of delights; powders and potions which pinched the rose in her cheeks from windblown English to sun-drenched Tuscan. Her precious favourite pair of earrings, gifted to her from her best friend, which lay on the velvet cushioning within, bickering like a married pair for all eternity in their tiny cream box.

We managed. Mornings were careful operations. I’d dive under my duvet to tug on my school uniform (since, being adolescent and coy and also mostly anorexic—but that’s another story—for my teenage years, I’d yelp if she saw me getting changed.) Invariably I’d end up charging round the house bullishly, upending stacks of books and disturbing our cat to try and locate some misplaced lanyard or piece of homework or my P.E. kit. She’d always ask if she could help even though her mornings before work were so precious to her—the rituals of making coffee, fussing over our cat, putting on the laundry, watching her favourite left-wing political pundits when they appeared on the news, selecting her outfit. The attention paid to her outfit was important rather than self-indulgent, I do not scruple to add: since she owns a clothes shop, she often wears the very clothes she sells.

Similarly, every time I got ready to go off to university after a vacation, I would leave the task of packing until the morning I returned: flinging too many clothes into bags to the detriment of forgetting important things like saucepans or kitchen knives. (I am my mother’s daughter. It is always clothes with us.) I would know when to phone or text her judging by the frequency of parcels I would receive whilst away. When I noted an increase in the rate of them, that was a clear sign that I should probably make more of an effort. Parcels of charity shop finds—excellent vintage skirts—I’d always offer to reimburse her but she’d never let me; she’d almost feign being insulted. ‘No, don’t worry about it. My Irish friend gives them to me for next to nothing.’ By this she means one of the volunteers in her favourite charity shop. Her other rejoinder is: ‘I like shopping for you! It makes me happy.’ Unfortunately I believe her. It is, after all, the kind of selfless thing which would make her happy. And do you know—the clothes that my mother picks out for me are always the ones which I get compliments on.

Mistake me not, she has her contrary shortcomings. For example, she has a very strange personal economic policy. To her, it counts as ‘using up’ the cream cheese which is sitting glumly in the fridge if she buys smoked salmon and bagels to eat with it. Smoked salmon is, obviously, not cheap. I feel it is a product and a purchase which is hardly in-keeping with the spirit of using things up. We also have the most ridiculous quarrels. One was over whether a recipe for tart would serve eight or six. I was adamant that it would comfortably feed eight, as the recipe proclaimed; she dissented.

It is my mother’s sixty-third birthday today. You’d never know it looking at her. She has a mane of blonde curls and a not-at-all-small nose and a flushed but tanned complexion and the same green eyes which are visited on every member of her Irish family, it seems. Once, aged eight or nine and in a fit of rage as I was prone to—very much like a modern Jane Eyre—I chanced to call these eyes ‘sludge’. I inherited none of her looks and am the spitting image of my father. She has never let me forget this particularly wounding insult. She has also never let me forget the time I deviously called her ‘third best mummy’, ranking two of my friends’ mothers above her. Geri and Lucy, if you ever see this, you were my winners and pipped my poor mother to the post. (Thank you also for being my village and for wordlessly stepping in to help raise me when my mother worked seven days a week as well evenings.) In the end, of course, I have reshuffled things, and now my own mother comes at top of my league. It turns out that she has won by an enormous margin. Terribly sorry.

She makes her own clothes, too—in this day and age. The dress she wore to my graduation was of her very own craftsmanship. Every time she got complimented for it I would proudly interject and boast that she made it herself, because goodness knows she wasn’t going to mention it herself.

I never told my mum about my boyfriend. I had intended to but I kept putting it off. She would have loved it though. Doubtless she would have taken me out to get wine and dinner and had me tell her about him; properly relaying the story, leading her by the hand down all the discursive enclaves, rendering descriptions of places and people as minutely as I saw fit to do. She is an appetitive listener; complaisant and receptive. She lets you do the job of story-telling quite as it had ought to be done and regales you with all the suitable listener’s fanfare once you have finished.

It strikes me now that telling my mother about said boyfriend would actually have been the perfect birthday presents. As things stand, I have bought her tickets to see Les Miserables in the West End. Either way, there would have been tears.

Panegyrics on my mother aside, deserved though they might be, I don’t know what I’m going to do. As it stands, I have run away from everything. There is my room in Oxford to think of. Rent day will still come, you can be sure of it. The seven (seven!) self-help books my brother bought me for my twenty-first birthday have not prepared me for this. He always gets me books and I love it. One year it was a beautifully bound set of Jane Austen novels. Sponsored by his generosity, I re-read Pride & Prejudice the summer before I fell in love and the beauty of the text served uncannily as the perfect precipitate, for my own love recapitulated so many of Darcy’s dear qualities. (One of my friends and I used to fawn over this in those early days of texting and guesswork and flirtatious uncertainty. She worked as a student librarian for our college library and on quiet evenings she would invite me over to her desk, and between stressing about our coursework (oh, lovely innocent stress, unworthy even of the name!) she’d patiently let me gush over him. Independently of my own remarks, she called him a Fitzwilliam Darcy if ever she’d come across one.)

I’ve been applying for jobs but what I’d really like to do is settle into hibernation and do nothing for a while, like a mangy squirrel or a tired owl. This, however, would in the end be an even surer failure than my having been fired in the first place. I must not let this happen.

Eleven months into 2024, here’s how things stand. Fell in love, had the love spurned, got a 2.1 and not a first in my degree, didn’t think to apply for any Master’s programmes, desperately wished that I had, turned twenty-one, found an office job in Oxford, moved back to Oxford because my friends and ex were there, starting applying to scholarships, got an All Souls viva, failed said viva, continually embarrassed myself, lost my job, and then ran the hell away. Oh dear. I am telling you this because, on the one hand, the impulse to confess is embedded matrilineally in my Irish Catholic heritage and mainly because I so seldom read of people failing. I don’t think there’s anything particularly dramatic or special in my failures; they just are. I don’t expect them to be a comfort to any of my readers, but I hardly expect that any of them will make you feel worse about yourself. Solidarity is what I proffer. Take it. I’m with you and we’re going to end up alright.

An illustration for Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women (1868-9) by Jessie Willcox Smith for a 1915 edition. It is one of my mother’s favourite books and incidentally she reminds me so much of the mother in it.

1. The website is titled: Christmas: It’s a furry affair, UK set to spend up to £873 million on presents for dogs and cats this Christmas, despite rising costs - Co-op. (Please forgive the shoddy footnote. I can’t seem to link this; I don’t know why; my laptop is being dastardly.)