Writing the Lone Mother’s Lifetime: Peter Handberg’s Den vita fläcken

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of a son’s ‘relational auto/biography’ of his lone mother; Swedish author Peter Handberg’s novel Den vita fläcken (The White Spot 2015). It focuses on how the book builds a sense of the mother Gunhild’s lifetime through the use of three different temporal dimensions: historicization, extension, and relational weaving of life courses. Matrifocal books by sons are interesting in several ways. First, in that they counter the gendered convention of sons’ patrifocal auto/biography, and cross over to the matrifocal auto/biography that has typically been linked to the mother-daughter relationship. Second, in contrast to patrifocal narratives that typically attempt to recover the parent who was absent or lost, they attempt to tell the story of the always-present parent: the mother. In their description of a close, ongoing, and often loving – although seldom unproblematic – relationship between a (now middle-aged) son and his mother, they furthermore counter ingrained cultural myths that envision ‘mother-son separation as the precondition of manhood’ (O’Reilly 2016, 15). Therefore, I argue, while sons’ auto/biographical writing about their lone mothers can be an inroad to investigating how subjective narratives of (lone-parent) family lives are constructed in life writing, they can also be inroads to re-thinking conventional genderings in literary studies.

Keywords

• relational auto/biography
• sons
• matrifocal
• filial life writing