Like Mother, Like Mother

There are several settings for the novel thus far—Detroit, the suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Cincinnati, and Washington, DC—and these locations mirror the characters’ personal and professional journeys. Aldo, a General Motors laborer, and his young children are represented by hardscrabble Detroit, especially as the automobile industry began to weaken. Aldo is as cruel to his children as the city’s deterioration is to its residents—the result of the economic decline, increasing racial tensions, and rapid suburbanization. Detroit, a city shaped by economic hardship and industrial collapse, parallels the rigid and often unforgiving structure of Aldo’s household, where survival is paramount, and tenderness is absent. Lila, Clara, and Polo do not enjoy an idyllic childhood like Joe’s in Bloomfield Hills. The Pereira children “belonged to the Linwood Gang […] carried double-action switchblades and knew how to use them” (11). Joe’s privilege protects him from the dangers, misfortunes, and abuses the Pereiras face, just as the lush homes and sprawling lawns of Bloomfield Hills are insulated from the harsher realities of urban Detroit. This stark contrast between Bloomfield Hills and Detroit not only underscores class divisions but also sets up Lila’s internal conflict—her desire for upward mobility clashing with her deep-seated belief that she is shaped by the violence of her upbringing. 

When Lila and Joe relocate to Cincinnati, they move to a city on the rise just as their careers are taking off. Lila meets Quinlan and benefits from his “rigorous tutelage,” so much that she begins to ascend the career ladder when she and Joe make their next move to Washington, DC. Soon, she is married in an extravagant to-do in Bloomfield Hills and continues to make a professional name for herself in DC. She becomes affluent enough that she can set up trusts for her children, who all benefit from their upwardly mobile mother and affluent father. Instead of starting in Detroit, as Lila did, her kids begin life in a more economically robust and less dangerous home than she did. This progression illustrates one of the novel’s central themes: The Importance of Women’s Personal and Professional Fulfillment. Despite the generational trauma she carries, Lila manages to break free from the constraints of her past and provide her daughters with a vastly different upbringing, even if they wish for more of an emotional presence from her.

Rieger also employs many allusions that help develop characters and provide context from other texts and individuals to deepen their interiority. For example, Joe describes Aldo as being like two of the nastiest characters in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, a novel that follows the titular orphan as he’s abused and exploited. He says Lila’s “father was […] part Fagin, part Bill Sikes. Mostly Bill Sikes” (10). Fagin kidnaps orphaned children and trains them to pick pockets for his own benefit. Bill Sikes is a particularly vicious, ruthless, and cruel criminal. This allusion elevates Aldo’s brutality and malice to almost mythic levels, making it clear just how loathsome a man he is, highlighting The Impact of Unresolved Trauma on his family. By drawing this parallel, Rieger suggests that Aldo does not merely continue a cycle of abuse but actively cultivates it, exerting control through sheer violence, much like Dickens’s villains. It also suggests that he is responsible for Zelda’s death, just as Bill Sikes murders his girlfriend, Nancy. Lila’s joke that the movie hero Crocodile Dundee “stole [a] move from [her]” when he pulls a knife on a mugger further characterizes the violence of her childhood and the ways she was compelled to adapt to survive (11). Her reference to a pop culture figure in a lighthearted way contrasts sharply with the grim reality of why she carries a switchblade, reinforcing her detachment from the trauma she endured. Further, the way Lila relates to the main character in Eminem’s movie 8 Mile also suggests the wide gulf between where she began her life and who she hoped to become, personally and professionally. Her “borrowed nostalgia,” as she calls it, also suggests the importance of women’s personal and professional fulfillment, as well as The Inescapability of Maternal Legacies, as Lila’s understanding of her history is often filtered through narratives that are not her own. She reconstructs herself through these cultural references, distancing herself from the rawness of her past while still acknowledging the impact it has on her.

Likewise, Lila’s casual and emotionless tone when discussing her mother’s apparent mental illness as “yellow-wallpaper-depressed”—especially in contrast with the alternative of “padded-cell-deranged”—disguises the horrors of depression and the way Zelda’s traumatic home life (15), especially her pregnancies, could have impacted her. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” depicts a late-Victorian era mother who experiences what is likely postpartum depression after the birth of her son. Her husband, a doctor, subjects her to the “rest cure,” a repressive and torturous “treatment” for female anxiety and “hysteria.” Rather than cure her, however, the narrator becomes delusional, eventually believing that the ugly yellow wallpaper in her room is a sort of sentient prison. In short, the “treatment” makes her a great deal more ill than she was to begin, and possibly Zelda’s treatment, which included “shock therapy,” was equally as inhumane. This comparison suggests that Zelda, like Gilman’s protagonist, was a victim of societal expectations about women’s mental health, where the response to distress was often hospitalization rather than actual care. Thus, this allusion also highlights the impact of unresolved trauma as well as the inescapability of maternal legacies. Further, by linking Zelda to a literary figure who is both imprisoned and silenced, Rieger underscores the brutal consequences of a system that punishes women for struggling under patriarchal pressures. 

Grace alludes to a different “madwoman”—Bertha Rochester from Jane Eyre—when she uses a drawing of this character on the cover of her book, The Lost Mother. When Ruth comments on it, Grace “point[s] to her [own] forehead” and says, “This attic,” implying that the novel’s versions of Zelda and Lila are fictions, amalgams of absent and mentally compromised mothers, even implying that Grace is a “madwoman” herself because of the influences of her maternal forebears (96). By associating herself with Bertha, Grace acknowledges her own fears of being trapped by familial expectations and history. This allusion, therefore, demonstrates the same themes. However, unlike Bertha, who is locked away and ultimately perishes in the fire, Grace asserts control over her narrative by writing The Lost Mother, thereby shaping the story rather than becoming its victim. Her act of storytelling becomes an act of rebellion against the legacy of maternal erasure and silence that defines her lineage.

Additionally, Rieger’s use of roman à clef as a storytelling device reinforces the blurred lines between fiction and reality in both Grace’s novel and the novel itself. Grace’s decision to portray Lila and Zelda in ways that alter or “intuit” the truth suggests that, for her, storytelling is both a means of discovery and a method of control. This metafictional element highlights how subjective memory is, especially in families where trauma has created gaps in understanding.

Lila’s detachment from her past and her tendency to frame her experiences through cultural references reveal the extent to which she has compartmentalized her trauma. Unlike Grace, who actively seeks to reconstruct and understand the past, Lila treats her history with a level of emotional distance that suggests both resilience and avoidance. Her ability to rise professionally, despite her painful upbringing, speaks to her determination and intelligence, yet it also underscores her reluctance to engage with her emotions in a meaningful way. While she ensures her children have material security, she struggles to provide them with the warmth and openness they crave, reinforcing the impact of unresolved trauma. Lila’s past may have shaped her, but it does not define her in the way it does Grace—whereas Grace fixates on what was lost, Lila focuses on what can be gained. This fundamental difference in their approaches to the past sets up one of the novel’s key tensions: whether confronting trauma head-on, as Grace does, is more or less effective than Lila’s method of survival through detachment. Ultimately, their contrasting methods of coping highlight the inescapability of maternal legacies, as both women struggle, in different ways, with the burdens inherited from Zelda’s fate.

Overall, the first section of Like Mother, Like Mother establishes its central tensions through layered storytelling, allusion, and thematic mirroring. Through Lila’s professional rise, her maternal ambivalence, and Grace’s attempts to reconstruct her family history, Rieger explores how identity is shaped by the past while also arguing that women can redefine their own narratives.