Was Blythe Ever the Unreliable One, or Was Fox?

A mother, a daughter, and a question nobody’s supposed to ask out loud

Blythe Connor comes from a line of women who could not, or would not, love their children right. Her grandmother abandoned her mother. Her mother abandoned her, eventually, after years of being present but absent, cold in a way Blythe describes with the precision of someone who’s replayed it ten thousand times. So when Blythe gets pregnant with Violet, she is determined, white-knuckled, going to be different. She’s going to break the chain.

Except Violet is a difficult baby who becomes a strange, watchful toddler, and Blythe cannot bond with her the way the books and the other mothers at the park seem to. Meanwhile Violet’s father, Fox, thinks his daughter is perfect and thinks his wife is losing it. Then they have a second baby, a boy, Sam, and Blythe finally feels the flood of love she’d been promised and never got with Violet. And Violet watches her mother love her brother in a way she never loved her.

I’m not going to tell you what happens to Sam. If you know, you know, and if you don’t, you deserve to hit that chapter cold the way I did, on a Tuesday afternoon, feeling my stomach drop somewhere around page 200 in a way that no thriller had done to me since Gone Girl.

Here’s the thing about Violet

The genius of this book, and I don’t use that word loosely, is that Audrain never lets you decide if Violet is actually a bad seed or if Blythe is a woman so terrified of repeating her mother’s failures that she’s manufactured a villain out of her own daughter’s ordinary weirdness. Kids are weird. Kids do unsettling things. Is baby Violet actually cruel, or is Blythe pattern-matching her own inherited fear onto a kid who just doesn’t smile enough?

That ambiguity is the whole engine of the book, and for the first two thirds it works like a trap snapping shut in slow motion.

Where it gets messier, and I think this is a fair criticism even from people who loved it, is the second half, when the book starts making choices that resolve the ambiguity a little too much in one direction. There’s a moment involving a bridge, later in the book, that a lot of readers (myself included, second read) feel tips the book’s hand in a way the more restrained first two thirds never would have allowed. It wants to have it both ways: unreliable narrator as literary technique, and also, actually, definitively, here is what happened. You can’t fully have both, and I think Audrain wanted the gut punch more than she wanted the ambiguity, and I get why, it’s a hell of a gut punch, but it costs the book some of its intellectual nerve.

The prose style is another thing people fight about. Audrain writes in short, hammering sentences, present tense sections interspersed with letters Blythe writes to Fox, and a structure that jumps between Blythe’s childhood, her mother’s life, and the present. It’s propulsive. It also occasionally reads like it’s trying too hard to sound Literary with a capital L, all those fragments doing emotional labor a full sentence could have done better. I didn’t mind it. I know people who found it exhausting by chapter ten.

Now here’s where I question my own taste a little: I’ve recommended this book to at least six friends, and about half of them called me afterward furious, not at the book, at Blythe. They found her so unlikeable, so willing to abandon a child she’d decided was evil, that they couldn’t get past it to see what Audrain was actually doing, which is interrogating exactly that impulse: our cultural refusal to let mothers be anything less than instantly, instinctively loving. I think that anger IS the book working. But I’ll admit there’s a version of this where the unlikeability just reads as unlikeability, full stop, and the thematic argument doesn’t rescue it for everyone. Both things can be true.

The scariest thing about this book isn’t the daughter. It’s the possibility that maternal instinct is a story we tell mothers, not a guarantee we give them.

About Ashley Audrain

Before she was a novelist, Audrain worked in publishing publicity in Toronto, which explains a lot, honestly, because The Push is engineered like a book someone in marketing knows exactly how to sell: a hook you can pitch in one sentence, a controversy built into the premise. She wrote it while raising two young children of her own, and has said in interviews that the book grew out of her own complicated, unglamorous feelings about early motherhood, the parts nobody puts on a onesie. Her follow-up, The Whispers, kept circling similar territory (motherhood, suburban menace, women judging women) with less impact, which tells me The Push might have been lightning in a bottle rather than the start of a totally reliable pattern. That’s not nothing. Lightning in a bottle is still lightning.

If this wrecked you, read these next

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, the obvious ancestor of this book and honestly the rawer, more unrelenting version of the same question.

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, for the same maternal-rage territory played as feral, funny body horror instead of thriller.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, if you want the “is she a good mother” question spread across a whole neighborhood instead of one house.

You can grab a copy here: The Push by Ashley Audrain.

For your book club

1. Do you think Violet was actually dangerous, or did Blythe’s fear create the story she needed to tell about her daughter?
2. How much of Blythe’s failure to bond with Violet do you think was inherited trauma versus something more like postpartum depression the book never quite names?
3. Fox refuses to believe Blythe for most of the book. Is that a failure of imagination, of love, or of the culture that tells men mothers are naturally patient and children are naturally innocent?
4. Did the ending change how you felt about the ambiguity in the rest of the book, and if so, for better or worse?
5. Would you have told this story differently if it had been narrated by Violet, or by Fox?