The Mother Next Door
- kjoannerixon
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
There is significant overlap between this book and Dunlop's podcast, Nobody Should Believe Me, which I've also listened to. I find the podcast compelling but mostly listen to it because the fucked up family dynamics are something I relate to. It's like pressing on a bruise to see if it still hurts, for me--so it's hard to tell if other folks would feel positively about it.
The Mother Next Door is strongest when Dunlop writes about the gender bias that lets women get away with murdering children, and weakest when she writes about the weird fascist cops she's become personal friends with. She could stand to look directly at 'save the children' rhetoric and analyze when that rhetoric is helpful and when it actually harms children (and everyone else), and I am hopeful that in the future her podcast might focus on this as she looks more at the competing narrative of 'medical kidnapping' and the parents' rights movement.
Anyway, that's all sort of extraneous. This is a book about three different cases of women who hurt their kids to fulfill their own emotional needs. In some ways it's absolutely wild shit, especially the kinds of medical procedures they use to cause harm, and in other ways it's completely predictable. Abusers are never very different from each other, at their core.
I will probably at some point read Dunlop's novel, We Came Here To Forget, which she talks about in the intro to this book as the catalyst for her focus on medical child abuse. The book contains the result of her working through her own family's trauma, and as I sit here thinking about my novel manuscript that is 85% complete except I can't figure out how it ends because I can't figure out how my own family trauma ends... I don't know, I think it would be interesting. We'll see when I decide to take that endeavor on, though!
Trigger warning for semi-graphic descriptions of injuring, drugging, and starving children, including to death.
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