The Doloriad by Missouri Williams
Aug. 31st, 2025 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
m_oonmoonThe Doloriad left me with an inexplicable feeling that I wanted to replicate by reading other books written by Williams. I found out that this is Williams' debut novel and now I'm just left feeling that some people are just born to write. She weaves from one perspective to another so seamlessly that if you don't pay attention, you'll find yourself miles away from where you first started. There were many times where I had to read back paragraphs just to catch the exact moment when the point of view shifted. Add to this her almost meandering prose and you have an atmospheric novel that feels almost inaccessible. I say inaccessible but Williams does make sense, it just takes a little more work to get to it (unlike Cusk who is complete gibberish to me).
The main deterrent to enjoying this novel is probably its grotesquerie.The story is set in a post-apocalyptic city. The only remaining inhabitants on earth seems to be an encampment with the matriarch, who intends to repopulate the earth in her own image, and her children. The necessity of incestuous relationships breeds a new set of humans who grow ever stranger and ungovernable to her. The matriarch's children are cruel, almost devoid of any humanity, yet we see them navigate the incomprehensibility of an empty world, a world without a god, none of the old world ethics and norms to guide them, and somehow they feel almost familiar. Their search for meaning is not unfamiliar to us. The matriarch mirrors this desire for meaning in her desperate belief that there are other encampments like theirs.
Lately, I have been trying to unscramble my own feelings towards my mother, family and what it means to love them when you also feel caged and smothered. In reading The Doloriad, there are odd moments when I see myself and my own mother. Perhaps this is a personal reading, informed by my current personal circumstances. I would love to read this again when I have understood more of myself.
The main deterrent to enjoying this novel is probably its grotesquerie.The story is set in a post-apocalyptic city. The only remaining inhabitants on earth seems to be an encampment with the matriarch, who intends to repopulate the earth in her own image, and her children. The necessity of incestuous relationships breeds a new set of humans who grow ever stranger and ungovernable to her. The matriarch's children are cruel, almost devoid of any humanity, yet we see them navigate the incomprehensibility of an empty world, a world without a god, none of the old world ethics and norms to guide them, and somehow they feel almost familiar. Their search for meaning is not unfamiliar to us. The matriarch mirrors this desire for meaning in her desperate belief that there are other encampments like theirs.
No, it would never be like that. She was desperate. She wanted to discover a pattern that would ave her, and thinking like this was dangerous and superstitious, because if the years after the disaster had shown her anything it was that nothing was connected, nothing could be made to cohere except through the objective trickery of her own actions, the real-world imposition of her belief or will, which was by no means necessary, and so she couldn't allow herself to weaken, to start perceiving meaning where there was none, to surrender the grueling, imaginative labour of keeping them afloat, the family going - life's venture! She couldn't allow herself to forget that they were alone, nothing else out there, nothing but the mask of her paranoia and the slow drip of her isolation, and the threat that faced them was not the threat she had dreamed up at all but something else altogether, something more entrenched and far more fatal [...]
Lately, I have been trying to unscramble my own feelings towards my mother, family and what it means to love them when you also feel caged and smothered. In reading The Doloriad, there are odd moments when I see myself and my own mother. Perhaps this is a personal reading, informed by my current personal circumstances. I would love to read this again when I have understood more of myself.