“Mother Doll” is a Russian Nesting Doll of the Weight of Generational Inheritance

Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash Katya Apekina, author of critically acclaimed The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish , opens her newest novel, Mother Doll , with a nesting set of characters linked by familial ties and the weight of generational inheritance. Zhenia, a medical translator in Los Angeles, finds herself pregnant. Meanwhile, her beloved grandmother is dying. And, her deceased great-grandmother Irina, formerly a Russian revolutionary, approaches a psychic medium named Paul, begging him to connect her with Zhenia so that she can tell a story that has, for many years, remained a secret, obfuscated by time, geography, and trauma. In purgatory, where Irina exists as her teenaged self, school uniform and all, a group of people coalesce in voice and in pain. When Paul first hears them, they announce: “We are all dead and none of us have been able to move on. We talk at once. We are aggrieved.” These early declarations reveal the heart of Mother Doll . Apekina, through the two intersecting narratives of Zhenia and Irina, a deep understanding of the Russian Revolution, and a clear-eyed portrayal of how complicated and necessarily fierce relationships can be between mothers and their daughters, asks, in her novel: Is it possible to move through or past trauma by speaking it aloud? If someone bears witness to the parts of ourselves we have tried to separate because of shame, fear, or the unspeakability of an experience, does it make it more bearable to live with or through? How are the excruciating, unspeakable parts of our lives passed down from one generation to another, both through biology and/or through the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives? I spoke with Katya Apekina over Zoom about the power of female rage, how shame can keep us stuck, and the limitations of language, particularly when describing trauma. Jacqueline Alnes: What drew you to write about the Russian Revolution, and what did you take from writing with such depth and care about the time period? Katya Apekina: I’m from Russia and it was this event that ended up […]

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