How to love your daughter: so many ways to get it wrong

Early on in the novel, How to Love Your Daughter, the narrator Yoella talks about a book she has read in which a mother of two daughters, “loved them and, at the same time, didn’t know how to love them. And there’s the rub, the problem with love,” she concludes.

It’s a problem which is, according to Israeli author, Hila Blum, “the underlying current of the book and what prompted me to write it, because if there could be a clear distinction between the thing itself and the ‘how to’, then it will be easier for all of us,” she laughs.

Blum’s beautiful and spare novel, depicting the relationship between Yoella and her only child, Leah, won the prestigious 2021 Sapir Prize for a work of literature in Hebrew - the Israeli equivalent of the Man Booker Prize. She will be speaking by Zoom this Sunday at Melbourne Jewish Book Week and also doing a Zoom session later in the year with the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival.

“When I started writing the novel, as a relatively new parent I was really concerned by what seemed like an infinite number of daily decisions that parenting demanded, like what am I going to feed her, how to treat her illness, how to plan her schedules or to which kindergarten to enrol her, should I have a talk with her teacher, should I check her homework, how much should I intervene in her relationships and so on,” says Blum.

Blum, like her narrator Yoella, is the mother of an only daughter, but she is clear that this is not autobiographical. “It is not at all about us but, in a way that is inherent to fictional writing, what prompted it was my own concerns and my own worries. I was struck by the impossibility of predicting the accumulative long-term effect of all this decision making.”

For Blum, the question is, can parents, like herself, driven by emotions that they recognise to be love and motivations they perceive to be benign, still arrive at making the wrong decisions? In Yoella’s case, the answer is ‘yes’, because we find her at the start of the novel, standing on a dark street in a foreign country, spying on her grandchildren and the beloved daughter from whom she has become estranged.