Sunday Read: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

I was a little wary when I opened the provocatively-named anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me; a collection of “forty new fairy tales” compiled by Kate Bernheimer. Re-told, re-imagined and modernized fairy tales have become wildly popular lately- and I’ve left many a cinema and shut many a book feeling disappointed. Too often the director or writer makes an easy interpretation by amping up the sex and violence while just barely clinging to the bones of the fairy tale – at that point, why not just write an entirely new story? At other times I can barely spot a difference from the original folk tale besides a shifted point of view. After a while the poor, misunderstood wicked step mother’s perspective gets pretty old. So I didn’t let my hopes get too high when I began reading My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised.

One of the collection’s major virtues is the sheer variety of authors who re-worked fairy tales and myths into their own style of story; greats of the genre like Neil Gaiman are filed among newer writers I’d never heard of, and even authors not always associated with fantasy – Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike, for example – contribute to make the anthology wonderfully well-rounded. In her quest to present fairy tales as legitimate inspiration for quality literature, Bernheimer solicited pieces from authors “whose work had suggested ‘fairy tale’… whether in obvious or subtle ways.” She isn’t kidding about that.

Some of the stories were ridiculously fantastical, some verged on sci fi, while others had only the slightest hint of fairy tale hidden within the writing. The selection covers a whole spectrum but each story stands out as a shining example of its kind. In a way this extreme variety could seem jarring; Timothy Schaffert’s trippy and disturbing “The Mermaid in the Tree” preceded a story by Katharine Vaz which contained absolutely no magic and read like a realistic literary examination of a relationship. Staggeringly different in tone, the fact that both stories were based on “The Little Mermaid” surprised me. The stylistic disconnect between stories proved to be a good thing, though, as 533 pages of only a few writers’ voices would have been boring at best and irritating enough that some stories would go entirely unread. Instead we have forty new fairy tales told in forty unique styles, and something can be found within the anthology for every reader.

I would recommend My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me to anyone with an interest in fairy tales, be it a residual love for the colorful films of one’s childhood or a growing fascination with folk tales and legends. It’s the sort of book you can read on the bus without fearing the judgmental glances of scholarly sorts (though they shouldn’t judge at all because at least you’re reading, right?). Kate Bernheimer has succeeded in convincing me, for one, that fairy tales can be fodder for serious literature as well as entertaining fluff, they just have to be wrought by the most capable hands in the business. I’m pleased and relieved to say that this is one book that I closed with regret rather than disappointment. I was sorry to reach the end and I hope to see similar endeavors on shelves in the future.

Amazon: £10.79

Written by Sarah Berman, standing-room-only writer