A book about mothers and daughters, the legacy of intergenerational trauma and how adults are simply middle-aged children. The need for the mother never leaves, even if she wasn't a great one. After years apart, a mum comes to visit her daughter in the hospital, just appearing at the end of her bed. There are moments of absolute tenderness juxtaposed with outright rejection. I had started to question whether this happened at all and that maybe her mum was an apparition. Her neighbour, Jeremy, told her she needed to be ruthless to be a writer. Was she holed up in the hospital, summoning her mother, steeling herself for what was to come? The title is a declaration. Perhaps she needed mothering so badly, just to sit and chat like normal people. Lucy's career was taking off but her marriage was falling apart. And so they do, they gossip and talk about people from the old home town, about everything except what's important: their own lives. Lucy's childhood and the terrible things that happened. The hardship, cruelty, emotional poverty, her scarred siblings, and her father's PTSD. Strout's narrative techniques: fragmentation, dashes, unadorned language etc are all emblematic of unassimilated trauma. Even its quasi-autofiction form - an individual split into two identities, a symptom of trauma. Heartrending.