is an inability to appropriately feel a sense of loss. As this narrator comes to realise, there can be little freedom from one's mother, even after her demise.

Not everyone has a mother, but everyone at some point will have had one, and therefore an origin, a starting point. In fairytales and classic novels, motherless children are forced to rely on their wits and an inherited compass to help them navigate a range of obstacles, from evil stepmothers to the orphanage and more existential concerns, towards an eventual sense of belonging. Though she is an adult at the time of her mother's death, the narrator of Queenless is rendered quite suddenly rudderless by her mother's passing – or, to use the apian metaphor which gives the book its title, "queenless." As Joan Didion wrote in her memoir Where I Was From, such a loss occasions a profound crisis of origins, no matter the age at which it occurs. Didion wrote: "It would be a while before I realised that 'me' is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from." It is a crisis imprinted on a narrator's subjective consciousness, altering and reordering their narrative, winnowing it to the bare bones of loss in the language imparted to them by their mother, their mother tongue. Marcinów writes in the book's heartbreaking epilogue:

There was a girl without a mother and without fingernails, a Disney princess.

And even though she was in mourning, she was terribly happy.

And even though she lived as an orphan, she was terrible.

And even though she was motherless, she lived, terribly.

And even though she lived terribly.

And even though she lived.

Laura Allsop is a writer and editor based in London, with a specialism in art and culture. Her writing has appeared in AnOther Magazine, ArtReview and The Guardian, among other titles.

MIRA MARCINÓW

Titles By This Author

QUEENLESS