Millicent Milner is over 30 now but still floundering and in pain, still running away. So is her big sister, Geena. Why? Everyone fawned over their suburban American parents. “You girls are so lucky! Such a charming mother you have! And that dynamic father!” Geena – wickedly funny and outrageous – goes at it alone, slashing out brutal sculptures with a chainsaw. As she proclaims: “A scream made of wood shrieks forever.” Millicent is divorced and also alone, with seven-year-old Alice. She hates her ‘stupid self’ but clings to the image of her past, present and future as brightly glowing pink. With sex as her art form, she’s certain that romance is her calling. When an Italian lover offers Millicent a teaching job – in Rome – she buys one-way tickets for herself and Alice. Finally! The answer…And off they go.
American born Susan Schwartz Senstad holds Masters’ degrees in psychology and fiction writing. She practiced in the U.S., Italy, and Norway as a psychotherapist and communications teacher and works now as a writer and editorial consultant. Her prize-winning first novel, ‘Music for the Third Ear’, was translated and published in five countries, and adapted and broadcast internationally as the ‘BBC Radio 4 Friday Play’, ‘Zero’. She lives in Oslo with her Norwegian husband with whom she shares three children and five grandchildren.
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Reviews
14 reviews
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Kisten Aasheim Educator, Norwegian and French literature
A WELL-WRITTEN STORY ABOUT DAUGHTERS, MOTHERS AND MOTHERHOOD
“What impact do our parents have on who we become as adults? More specifically for this novel: How can a daughter liberate herself from a mother who bullies her children psychologically, hits them, even actually hates them? How can a child who has been treated that way learn to become a good mother to her own children? I was moved to tears as I read this novel at the descriptions of the cruelty the mother put her daughters through and because Millicent treats her own little daughter, Alice, with so much wisdom and tenderness. Moving!
The language is exquisite — it flows — and the transitions between the present and the past are “seamless.” I know for sure that there are many daughters — and sons — out there who have had similar experiences to tackle — even if the folks around them haven’t wanted to believe them. Who likes knowing that some mothers actually can’t love?”
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— Barbara Van Noord Psychiatric Social Worker specializing in the treatment of Borderline Personality Disorders
“Mother Phyllis is a total pip. She sappily “character disorders” herself all over the page. She’s difficult and self-centered and quixotic and (yeah, Borderline – at least 7 of 9, or however many characteristics the DSM-IV requires, maybe hits ‘em all). The thought of her raising children is, well, hair-raising. But to the story, it doesn’t really matter a whit whether she’s diagnosable… — Phyllis has already nailed her own character by being and doing. The characters are so vivid that it is a natural for dramatization, with a multi-age female cast… it has all the makings of one of those movies that ends up being on “my favorite” list.”
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Dr. Anna Luise Kirkengen, Professor of General Practice/Family Medicine, General Practice Research Unit, Department of Public Health and Nursing, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
A scorpion’s venom is white as milk – from a distance, poison and nourishment might look the same. That’s what this novel is about. It confronts a taboo reality: that a mother can be vicious and, instead of nourishing her children, she might poison them – damaging their sense of self, their self-respect and self-confidence, their ability to forge good relationships.
Such damage can be inflicted without the cruelty ever being exposed. It might remain hidden behind a respectable façade, behind affluence and an orderly household, behind manipulative charm. Moreover, the weakness of the closest person – the father – the one best situated to recognize his wife’s cruelty, can perpetuate the damage, leading him to look the other way, to remain unwilling to acknowledge whatever he might see.
This toxic combining of damaging acts with complicit omissions, all within an ostensibly well-functioning family, is the raw material for a great deal of suffering and sickness. That is why explorations of this topic – including in the form of a novel – are important for all helping professionals. It is now well-documented that those who’ve suffered maltreatment during their childhood will, sooner or later, need some medical, psychological or social work practitioner or institution to treat what will manifest as “ill-health” or “behavioral problems”. And, those needs may well be characterized as consequences of the person’s own “strange” or “disruptive” habits of behavior or life choices.
Readers of this book meet two young adult sisters. The older is in a constant rage; as a child, their mother beat her. The younger sister lacks boundaries and allows herself to be used as a sexual plaything; she’d been sexualized by their mother, who flaunted the girl like a doll she’d dressed up to delight her husband – the girls’ father.
The problematic lives that both these sisters later establish become mirrors of the damage done to them. But it takes both of them time to grasp those connections. The younger of the two, the one who wasn’t beaten but rather dolled up and shown off, takes more time recognizing the patterns and finds it more difficult to admit to herself what she sees. Both of them have had to learn to identify what was done to them, and they needed help analyzing the impact it continued to have on them. And both needed to receive what they hadn’t experienced during childhood: being met with the respect and acceptance of someone who makes an untiring effort to understand them. Only then could they bear to make life choices that led toward good, healing relationships.
Thus, it did prove possible to uncover and understand the basis for these women’s “strange” and “disruptive” ways of living and being. Doing so, however, involved gathering intimate and accurate knowledge of the wounds they bore with them from childhood. Only once those became clear conceptually could change take place. Therein lies one of the core challenges that health professionals face.
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Anne Simon Educator, Private School Head
“I started last night and woke this morning at 6 am, got my coffee and curled up under my blanket on the couch to continue reading and I cannot put it down. I love it! I finished the book and now I’m missing everyone, particularly — all of them!”
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Thea Stabell Theater Director, Professor
“A book I couldn’t put down once I started reading it. I was struck by the acts of courage in this creation. It is an invigorating book. Yes, I would give it to others. It’s funny and sexy in necessary ways. It’s also first and foremost about a painful and important journey. It hit me in the belly. It has a strong narrative and a deep, deep undertow.”
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Gilbert Reid, writer, broadcaster and author Son of Two Fathers, So This is Love and Lava
Enthralling! Compulsive reading! Set in the glamorous, sensual, sexy Italy of the dolce vita and in febrile northern California, Susan S. Senstad’s MILK AND VENOM plunges us into the darkest corners of the female mind/psyche. Transgressing current gender politics, Senstad explores the destructive legacy of toxic motherhood. Two daughters, sisters, adopt brazen, volatile strategies in their desperate fight to save their sanity, claim their freedom, and create – out of the ruins – their lives and themselves. This is a wonderful book – a must read – highly dramatic, acutely self-aware, and often, in its ironies, quite funny.
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