Going Down Swinging

by Billie Livingston

Random House Canada, 2000

 

By Nancy Wigston

 

Family life is never easy, but the downward spiral of a mother and her two daughters, tracked by Vancouver’s Billie Livingston in this, her first novel, gives new definition to hard times.

 

The years are 1972-74, the places Toronto and Vancouver.  Eilleen Hoffman, the mother of teenaged Charlotte and 7-year-old Grace, is a self-pitying alcoholic with no discernible desire to improve her lot.  Eilleen presents a challenge not only to the series of social workers assigned to her case but also to herself, when her drinking, whoring and pill-taking threaten to cost her what she loves most: her younger child, Grace.  Charlotte has long since taken off to repeat her mother’s pattern of finding unsuitable men, although she pops in from time to time to assure her little sister of her love.  Chaos and love, they form the twin poles of Grace’s existence.

 

Gruesome as it may sound, this story is intelligent and touching, because Livingston reaches deep inside the minds of the unwilling stars of this near tragedy.  In prose that reflects her poetic skills -- “my chest was going to fall out my back” Grace says in an anguished moment -- Livingston alternates the voices of Eilleen and Grace, breaking up her narrative with reports from various social workers.  Grace, the innocent, naturally comes across as the most attractive player, but Livingston resists easy sentimentality at every turn.

 

The complexity of this life -- by extension, any child's -- is paramount.  Grace’s friends, neighbourhoods, schools and day camp; all assume their rightful importance.  When her mother’s latest bout of “sickness” overwhelms their life together, Grace neglected and underfed, becomes expert at feeding herself.  Her chocolate cake diet is grossly inadequate, but shows her grit and determination. Stubbornly, Grace plans

 for the future and struggles to comprehend the system.  The saddest scene in the book occurs when, faltering she tells herself to “act natural” -- but no longer has any idea what that entails.

 

But Grace has her true guardians -- her mother’s love is never in doubt, though she is absent.  Friends also take notice.  Livingston shows that no domestic implosion takes place in a vacuum.  Even the child-care workers don’t come off too badly; they aren’t Dickensian bullies.  Under the typos and social worker jargon, their reports not only reflect frustration with Eilleen (shared by the reader, too) but the desperate hope she will come to her senses.  “Well-meaning” carries a heavy irony when Grace is placed in a foster home of religious weirdos, but what to do?  Hell takes many forms.  Eilleen is nobody’s ideal Mum, but she is Grace’s, and Livingston does a subtle and effective job of making the specialness of their strange and loving -- and in the best of times fun-- family unit flame into memorable life.