by Gina Miller

 

Going Down Swinging

by Billie Livingston

Random House Canada, 2000

 

 

Remember the woman known as the "glue-sniffing mom" in Winnipeg? Or the "pellet baby" in Ontario? Remember the story you heard or the woman you knew whose children were taken away from her (for a week, or a month or a year) because she drank too much, or had put too many needles in her arm, or her husband walked out on her but left behind an ample supply of pills she could gobble in her sorrow and anger? These women and their children are in the news every day. Their pitiful, and often horrible stories, gratify our thirst for vicarious terrors. They appeal to our sense of schadenfreud; the perverse happiness we feel, knowing that misfortune has happened to another and not us. Billie Livingston's novel, Going Down Swinging is the story of a mother and daughter tangled in the ugliness of booze, poverty and pills. The book opens with the words, "No one ever thinks they'll sink So Low. So Low is someone else's life, someone else's man, someone else's job. Everyone imagines little rubber bands hooked at the shoulder, springing back to safety just before the life-sucking bedrock . . . " Livingston's book is about hitting bedrock. Her main character, Eileen Hoffman, is a former teacher and the alcoholic mother of two girls, Charlie and Grace. Charlie is sixteen when the novel opens, and she has already hit the road, running from group home to group home, boyfriend to hustler. Charlie fights so viciously with Eileen that the two cannot live together in the same house. Grace is seven. Grace loves her mother with a grim passion, and Eileen believes that without Grace she just might shrivel up and die. In a stew of empty liquor bottles, rumpled bed sheets - from Eileen's last trick - and moldy pizza cartons, Eileen and Grace lean on each other for love and support. Their mutual enemy is the Child Protection Agency. Set in the 1970s, Going Down Swinging is a clear-eyed investigation of a woman and child who have sewn their lives out of the rags available to them. Eileen collects welfare, she prostitutes for extra cash, she falls into periods of drunken orgies and ignores the growing filth to rise around the ears of her seven-year-old daughter. Grace, for her part, protects Eileen at her low points. She tries to keep child protection and social workers from their door. She wills herself to be tough and smart. She saves her own emergency supply of money and makes a few friends in whatever new slum she and her mother move to. Livingston's story tells us, without condemnation, what happens in families.

 

She explains the circumstances that shape the grim news events we read or gossip about. For all of their misery, Eileen and Grace have a rich relationship. They share humour, love and a desire to find something better and when Eileen's binges end, that is what they create for themselves. Going Down Swinging is a novel of frustration and hope. Like Grace, the reader wills Eileen to haul herself out of her bingeing cycle. Like the child protection agencies that flutter around the pair, we condemn Eileen for losing control, for allowing her small daughter to go for days unwashed and unfed. Livingston writes from three perspectives; Eileen's, Grace's and from the cold paper trail of social service's documentation of their case. The novel covers two years in Eileen and Grace's life. Charlie, the older sister, drifts in and out as well, arriving pregnant and with a torn face at her mother's door on **one, more** occasion. Grace idolizes Charlie, and Charlie looks on Grace as though her sister is her daughter, convinced as Charlie is that Eileen is totally unfit to parent anyone. The novel is driven by the clear and believable voices of its characters.

 

Eileen's fears and desires and shames are told without false sentiment. She is so convinced of her own truth - that she is hard-done by, that she does her best - that we often forget how guilty she is of neglect and criminal behaviour. While it could be easy to cast Eileen as a villain, there are other factors that carry the reader. It is impossible to reject a woman so full of good intentions; someone intelligent who realizes the extent of her mistakes when she is sober enough to see them, and who, at the end of the day, puts her daughter's safety above everything else in her life. Grace too has a voice of conviction. Her world is translated through the world-weary eyes of a little girl who is, although not a picture of perfect innocence, is trying to navigate through the streets and schools and dangers her mother's life presents her. "No one ever thinks they'll sink So Low," says Eileen at the opening of the novel. Eileen has sunk to the bottom and she is dragging Grace down with her.

 

 

She throws the same light on Eileen and Grace's world that Anna Quindlan did on the world of wife-abuse and battery in her novel Black and Blue. And as in Quindlan's novel we discover, there are no happy endings, just the possibility of fresh beginnings.

 

Gina Miller is a books columnist for The Reader.