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. 

So we are alerted from the get-go to the inherent irony of the book: Yoella, our guide on the ‘how to’ of love, has failed. She is an unreliable narrator. “One major challenge in writing in Yoella’s voice was writing Leah through her. That is, finding a way to signal to the reader, behind Yoella’s back, what Leah’s version of the story might be. I think the novel advocates that there is no such thing as a completely reliable narrator in the sense that no life can be fully chronicled.

“I would also say that I’m very interested in what a story says but also in what it keeps unsaid, in allowing readers to fill up the gaps with their own life experience, with their own knowledge. I leave a lot of room for a reader to join in with their own interpretations.”

It took Blum a decade to write How to Love Your Daughter, her second novel after her debut in 2011 with The Visit. “I’m such a slow writer. I try to write something that is interesting to me because I have to be engaged with this thing for years and years, emotionally and intellectually, in order to keep on doing the writing. I generally say that I erase more than I write and this is part of why it takes so long.

“I never start with a plot or a prearrangement of any sort. I have a knowledge of the sentiments I want to explore, then I play with various characters and predicaments and I come to understand and develop them.”

As well as being an author, Blum is a literary editor and she’s worked with some of Israel’s leading writers during her career. Was this what inspired her to write?

“I wouldn’t say that. Formally, I was credited as an editor before I was credited as a writer, but I was writing since whenever I can remember. I started off with some horrific poetry at six or seven years old. Writing was a way to understand things, to make things clearer for myself. But it was only 13 years ago that I thought I’d completed something that I recognised as a fully formulated novel that I would like to share with the world.”

And as a professional editor, how does it feel to be edited by someone else?

“Well, if it’s a brilliant editor like mine, it’s amazing. It’s like the most nourishing, wonderful thing, because after many, many years of spending time on your own manuscript, there is someone who truly cares about this completely fictional world that you have put together. For me it’s huge, this moment when I can share it with my editor.”

I ask Blum, who is fluent in English, if she always agreed with Daniella Zamir’s English translation of her book. “I think Daniella did incredible work." For Blum, more important than the faithful translation was the ability to experience her book anew in its English version.

“This translation was unique for me because it is the only translation that I could fully read. When you are a writer, you cannot really reread your book. For example, in the most obvious sense, when I read my own writing, I know how it evolves. But for the reader, not knowing how the story evolves is a huge part of the reading.”

Of course, even in English Blum knows how the book ends, but her familiarity with the ebb and flow of every Hebrew sentence has been disrupted. “I still know the book but the fact that it’s in another language, and I can read it, cancels some of the automation of the reading. This is the closest I could get to reading it as a reader.”

Given that she has confessed to being a slow writer, when can we expect her next book? She laughs. “Are you seriously asking that?”

“I don’t know, but I have been writing more than I expected at this point in time. It’s been three years since the book was published. I’m pleased with my progress but I also know that it’s only very late into the process that I know whether I can pull it off or not.”

The New York Times review of How to Love Your Daughter described it as a “masterwork of psychological tension” with “sentences as menacing as a swarm of jellyfish”. Reviewing her earlier book, The Visit, Etgar Keret wrote that she created a heart-shattering and anxiety-filled world.

Is that how she sees life?  

“I’m a very talented worrier. I can come up with really creative worries that would really impress you. I guess that’s reflected, to some extent, in my writing.”

Hila Blum will be in conversation with Tali Lavi via Zoom at Melbourne Jewish Book Week on August 18, from 10.30am-11.20am. CLICK HERE TO BOOK.