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ClareR (5991 KP) rated Call Me Mummy in Books

Feb 19, 2021  
Call Me Mummy
Call Me Mummy
Tina Baker | 2021 | Crime, Fiction & Poetry, Thriller
10
9.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
Call Me Mummy had me on tenterhooks from the first page. I don’t think I’ve been this emotionally invested in a book for a while. I read it on The Pigeonhole app, so it was serialised over 10 days - and the wait for each stave seemed interminable! Thank goodness I read it during the half term holidays so that I could get stuck in every morning!
Mummy abducts five year old Tonya from a supermarket when her mother, Kim, is preoccupied on er phone. Kim, in Mummy’s eyes is not the epitome of outstanding motherhood. In fact to Mummy, she’s the exact opposite: poor, working class, eternally pregnant, children from different fathers - common. So in Mummy’s mind, she’s rescuing Tonya from a life of want and neglect.
Except there are two sides to this story. Whilst Kim may have had a terrible upbringing and a bad start in life, she loves her daughter fiercely and in the months that follow, the loss of her daughter nearly breaks her.
To be honest, Mummy is hardly a leading example of motherhood. She’s mentally unstable, has also had a devastating childhood and drinks to excess. Not the best idea when you hardly eat anything.
Interspersed with short chapters alternating between Mummy and Kim, are the glimpses into the murky world of social media, where the terrible judgements would be terrible for Kim to read - if she read them, that is. But Kim takes a rather defensive view of herself and her family. She won’t play nice to the media or her community. But we as the reader get to see what’s going on in Kim’s head, and frankly, it broke my heart. Prepare yourself for that, by the way, because this book will have you swinging manically between heartbreak (fro Kim and Tonya) and murderous rage (for Mummy).
I’m not going to say any more. You’ll just have to read this book. I loved it, and the ending was perfect - my favourite kind of ending, in fact!
Thanks to Pigeonhole for serialising this, and so much thanks to Tina Baker for joining in with her comments and interactions with us Pigeonholers in the margins! I think I’m safe in saying that we all had the best time reading this!
  
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Illeana Douglas recommended Wild Strawberries (1957) in Movies (curated)

 
Wild Strawberries (1957)
Wild Strawberries (1957)
1957 | Drama
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"I spent my moviegoing life avoiding Ingmar Bergman movies. A few glimpses of The Seventh Seal or Persona made me think they were not accessible. I also knew Woody Allen worshipped him, so surely they were over my head. It was while working on my Ikea-sponsored web series Easy to Assemble that I thought: Well, if I’m going to be satirizing Swedish culture, I should watch some Bergman. He became the director from whom I have learned the most. He gave me the courage not to shy away from pain, which is the core of all comedy. The results are apparent in “Finding North,” an episode in Easy to Assemble’s third season, and all my writing since. I chose Wild Strawberries because in it I found the key that changed my work forever. I always lived in a daydream, where sometimes things felt real and sometimes they felt imagined. So much of an actor’s life is imagination. Wild Strawberries is a road-trip movie about an old man who looks back at his life, his loves, his regrets, and has to face certain truths about himself. The story is not revealed by flashbacks, though. It’s revealed by going from reality to daydream. He reflects on his past with a nostalgia for childhood. This makes reality feel more present and his relationship with his grown son and daughter-in-law more uncomfortable. Have you ever been in the presence of someone having an argument and thought, I can’t believe they revealed that to me? That is every scene in a Bergman film! After his wife died, Bergman said, “I was in a room built of my own sorrow.” No other sentence expresses the pain of losing a loved one in such a poetic way. His words are so revealing, and coupled with the right emotions, the right images, they bring me as close to the human experience as anything I have experienced in a film. There is another reason Wild Strawberries has a special place in my heart. In 2013, because of my involvement in Easy to Assemble, I was cast in a Swedish-American show called Welcome to Sweden. I like to imagine that Bergman had a hand in that. I shot a scene with Lena Olin in which we picked wild strawberries. It was not imagined, though. That really happened!"

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