Eilleen Hoffman is a binge alcoholic who can't manage to keep food in the house and often leaves her eight-year-old daughter, Grace, alone when she goes out to cruise for booze, men and money. The same Eilleen Hoffman is a university-educated teacher, a health nut, the type of vitamin-enriched mother who lectures on the evils of white flour. In her new novel, Going Down Swinging, Billie Livingston latches on to the contradictions of motherhood and addiction; Eilleen's dual identity of loving mother and irresponsible drunk is part of the novel's gritty joy.

 

Livingston alternates her narration between Grace and Eilleen. Grace's version of events is limited by her age and the "brain-cloud" disorientation of hypoglycaemia, but Livingston's ear for a girl-voice is note-perfect and she doesn't shrink from showing the complex system of love and justification that binds Grace to Eilleen. Part of Eilleen's appeal lies in her intelligence and humour. Her internal monologue while beguiling a social worker on a "home visit" gives Eilleen a wise-cracking dignity:

 

Ah the lovely hostess, you're charming as hell. Wish there was a tray, no actually, make two trips, it will illustrate just exactly the daily struggle that is your life. And still you smile in the face of it all: Glow little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer.

 

Livingston makes the odd but effective choice to narrate Eilleen's chapters in the second person, so that Eilleen speaks the chaos of her life in a syntax that fuses distance with a chummy bar confession. As readers, we are privy to Eilleen's wry commentary, but not her despair.

 

Touted as a novel about mother-daughter relationships, this book is also about women and poverty. Interspersed with the alternating voices of Eilleen and Grace, Livingston inserts reports from the Child Protection Agency. Initially, these reports have a no-nonsense calm, order in the midst of chaos. But Livingston pulls the rug out from under us when social workers report a number of factual errors about Eilleen and Grace, while striving to "improve the home environment."

 

Part of Eilleen's attractiveness lies in her unrepentant hedonism. Livingston dares to let Eilleen's needs go unpsychologized:

 

“Oh to sit and flirt again, at a dance, a bar, ‹ wouldn't have to drink, just dance, have a good time. Be a woman again instead of somebody's grandmother.”

 

The male commitment to carousing has often been lauded as the path to philosophy or great art; consider writer-drunks Charles Bukowski, Malcolm Lowry and Ernest Hemingway. Literature rarely casts a Dionysian woman as a great artist, but rather as a sad case. But Eilleen's partying seems a quest for pleasure, albeit a destructive one. Social work reports that attempt to pathologize her "condition" seem hilariously tight-assed. Eilleen's gender doesn't make her drunkenness more excusable, but Livingston contends that neither does her gender make her carousing repugnant.

Going Down Swinging is brave and rigorous writing about family, a serio-comic antidote to the definition of mother as martyr, and a long look at what "the best interests of the child" might entail.

 

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Tanis MacDonald is a graduate student at the University of Victoria and has had poems appear recently in Henry Street and The Fiddlehead. Her chapbook This Speaking Plant won the Acorn Rukeyser Award in 1997, and a second chapbook, Breathing November (Staccato Chapbooks), was published in 1999. Her collection Holding Ground was published by Seraphim Press in Spring, 2000.

 

This interview first appeared in Prairie Fire.