This sense of stigma fuelsRoot&Branch. At the careening,whirring,eye-of-the-hurricane centre of that stigma – Gunaydin’s mother. Gunaydin variously describes her as emotionally abusive and a hypochondriac whose illnesses,both real and imagined,prompt her to regularly inform friends of her imminent demise. Aged 12,Gunaydin,asking her mother if she can see a psychologist,is in turn asked by her mother exactly how she has failed her as a parent – before insisting that,after injuring her spine pushing young Eda in a pram,“[i]f anyone should be unhappy,it’s me”. Gunaydin responds diplomatically:“We can both be unhappy.″
“[A]nd so it was”,she concludes. Her father seeks respite intermittently from Eda’s mother and at other times provides respite from her for Eda. Asking her therapist if he is a bad person,her therapist informs her that there are no bad people,“just bad coping mechanisms”.
“Bad coping mechanisms” could beRoot and Branch’s subtitle. Gunaydin hungers for the parenting she was denied,for validation,a way out of fearing that nothing she ever is or does will be good enough. In ‘Kalitsal’ – a highlight – she describes the profound isolation of intergenerational trauma,the third-culture kid’s sense of having both to pre-emptively eulogise and admit defeat before it can admit itself. “Even if I were to catch a bird out of the air in my mouth I couldn’t have satisfied her,” she recalls her mother saying of her grandmother. “But still she crawled,and crawled,after her[...] in a way that we don’t crawl after her. She was so disappointed,and I couldn’t tell if it was in herself or me.”
In one of the book’s funniest passages,Gunaydin describes assisting her mother with her physical pain by providing her with a pot brownie,only to later have to talk her down on the family couch (“‘IfI die’,[my mother] insists,[...] ‘don’t blame yourself too much,okay?’“). Later in life,Gunaydin admits that she won’t always take her mother’s phone calls,but that she can recognise in her “an impulse,to be witnessed in her suffering,that I understand”.