Where I End

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Again this is serious stuff but White, who doubles as a podcaster on the macabre, has more fun in this section, letting the inner ‘creep flag’ fly and delving into weird and wonderful real-world body horror like necrophilia and consensual vampirism. When artist Rachel arrives on the island with her young son, Aoileann befriends her and begins to make herself indispensable in Rachel’s life. Corpsing: My Body and Other Horror Stories comprises a collection of personal, lived horror stories in which the setting is Sophie White's own body. The sea is death reanimated. Down under the shimmying surface, the currents conduct the corpses and they sway in a dance, ringed around the island’s underbelly. Aoileann is a young girl living on a remote island off the coast of Ireland. Despite most of the island's small population being somewhat reclusive and different from the mainlanders, Aoileann and her grandmother are treated as outcasts - strange people in a strange house where strange things happen. Away from prying eyes, Aoileann and her grandmother are tending (I use this word loosely) to her mother who is bedridden, catatonic and has become something of a desiccated husk of a human. And yet, she creaks in the night…

In Where I End by Sophie White, we are introduced to Aoileann, a young woman who lives with her grandmother and bed bound mother in a remote cottage, where they can live their lives away from the curious and disgusted looks from the locals on the island. Aoileann’s mother is not from the island, but her father was. He is now only a monthly visitor to the island, and every day Aoileann and her grandmother are responsible for the daily care of her mother. The only giveaway in My Hot Friend would be the searing honesty, and White’s astounding ability to chase down the uncomfortable and disturbing truths of living and painstakingly examine them. It's also human, and raw, and describes the horror and fear of motherhood better than anything I've ever read. White’s novel is set on an island in Galway Bay that bears a strong geographical resemblance to Inis Meáin in the Aran Islands. In an appendix she goes to some length to say that it is not the island, but a version of it, as if from a parallel universe. Undersocialised and unloved, Aoileann fantasises about a proper family and when Rachel, a young artist, arrives on the island with her infant son, Aoileann finds herself drawn to their unit and resolves to make herself indispensable to the tired, lonely mother.

In Where I End, White tells the story of three generations of women living in an island that is and also isn’t based on the Aran Islands.

White is incisive on how the Internet trades on women and body image, and how this has shifted in recent years, writing, "The fact was, ‘hotness ’wasn’t just a ‘state of mind’, as they’d endlessly proclaimed on the podcast. It took work." On the other end of the spectrum is Joanne, the first of her friend group to have a baby and struggling to make her friends accept that her circumstances have changed. Her baby shower descends into a bacchanal, with her friends snorting cocaine off her bump, while she cowers from her prenatal classes, afraid of facing up to her new reality. I see the sea’s gleeful mutilation of the men as inevitable. The island is hostile; the seas murder the men and regurgitate them for us to see and know what’s coming for us all.’When the first line of a novel starts ‘ My mother. At night, my mother creaks’, you know that this book is certainly going to be nothing like you have read for a while! I literally have my knitting in my bag right now. I would take it out if I didn’t think it was rude,” she says. On a remote and forbidding island off the coast of Ireland, a small community of fisher folk, most of whom have never learned to swim, live the same hand to mouth existence as they have for countless decades. Visiting tourists stay but a short time and are actively discouraged from doing so, by insular, inbred locals, who communicate in a dialect all their own and have a physical appearance which is unique and very disturbing to behold. The book opens with one of the most horrific scenes imaginable. White is in the throes of labour while elsewhere, in another hospital bed, her father’s life hangs in the balance. This section, A Haunting, is about the 'agonising, drawn-out horror show’ of his slow decline and eventual death from early-onset Alzeimers. Linking the two is Lexi, the co-host of a Call Me Daddy-esque podcast, Your Hot Friend, which Claire and Joanne’s partner Bert both devour. Lexi is the sensible foil to co-host Amanda, who is referred to as "the female Joe Rogan" in a magazine write-up.

The island seems to be some kind of breac-ghaeltacht, but what’s spoken there is a dialect barely related to Irish. When Rachel, an artist, arrives on the island with her newborn son, Aoileann sees the life she never had and a future she never dreamed of until now. I coloured it because my kids kept getting nits. It’s so glamorous!” she says, with typical candour. “It took about five hours. I was like: how do people do this on the regular shift? But I sat there and wrote my column while they did it.”

The pair live by their own warped Girl Code, maintaining an image of unflappable edginess. They perform the role of clued-in cool girls, making sure to "eat around people" as "diets weren’t on trend any more". Lexi swaps out meals for detox juices and documents her gruelling, pseudo-mindful bootcamp gym classes on social media.

The mother is a figure of pain, caught in a constant state of decay and self-destruction. She’s even stripped of her personhood. It brought to mind the exploration of masculinity and destruction explored in The Banshees of Inisherin and that particular plot twist – though we’ll leave it there for the sake of avoiding spoilers.Good Jaysus! What the hell did I just read?! This review will be mainly about the unsettling vibes of Sophie White’s Where I End because discussing the plot would give too much away. But, also, if I explained the whole story, you wouldn’t believe me anyway. Aoileann is treated with suspicion and malice by the islanders, and doesn’t interact with them. She has no friends and little time for herself. Her only respite is when she can escape to swim in the sea, away from the responsibilities and demands that caring for her mother brings. In contrast, the bed-bound mother is decrepit and withered. "If she were not so empty, I would be full", Aoileann thinks of her. Between the two, White explores the two extremes of motherhood: creation and destruction. Her seventh book and fifth novel, My Hot Friend (Hachette, 2023) was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award.