Trigger warning for physical and verbal child abuse.
Ruth Kahan has been evicted from assisted living housing and it’s her daughter, Tamar’s, problem to deal with. It’s never easy to care for an elderly parent but things are even more difficult for Tamar because Ruth used to abuse Tamar horrifically before Tamar ran away at age 18. Bitter is the Heart, by Mina Hardy, is not an easy book to read as it delves into the complicated feelings Tamar bears toward her mother and her obligations to care for a woman she knows is a monster.
Tamar is used to not being believed about her mother’s treatment of her, not even by her younger sister. No one ever seemed to see or hear the way that Ruth would punish her oldest child for every infraction, real or imagined. It’s only because we see things from Tamar’s point of view in this book that we can see how Ruth appears to be a charming, sometimes confused old lady in public but transforms into a spiteful creature determined to break Tamar down into a frightened, obedient minion. As Tamar struggles to balance her work, a reconnection to an old flame, and caring for her mother’s deteriorating health, we also start to understand Tamar’s assertion that there is something literally demonic about how her mother behaves in private.
I was scared for Tamar the entire time I read Bitter is the Heart. I was afraid for her sanity as old patterns—of violence and verbal abuse, of not being believed, of being seen as abusive herself—manifest themselves again. Ruth’s words and behavior made my skin crawl as her mood would flip on a dime from a mother who might want to make amends to her child to a creature that would say the most hurtful things and try to twist how people outside Tamar’s troubled home saw them.
This book almost didn’t need the supernatural element (which I won’t spoil) to put the frighteners on me. The sheer unpredictability of Ruth’s behavior was enough to make my blood run cold. That said, I appreciated the way this supernatural touch served to put a name on what was wrong with Ruth and with Ruth’s relationship with the world. Without the supernatural, Ruth’s actions could be diagnosed as a serious personality disorder—painful to witness and experience, but entirely mundane. Mental illnesses can be very hard to understand from the outside but everyone can easily understand the irrationality of monsters and the terror they can elicit in their targets.
I can’t say that I enjoyed this book as such, given that it freaked me out, but I can say that I appreciated its depiction of a tortured relationship between a child and a parent that I’ve rarely seen in fiction.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.