59 pages • 1-hour read
Like Mother, Like Mother
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Symbols & Motifs
Zelda’s Gold Necklace
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, child abuse, rape, suicidal ideation and self-harm, and physical and emotional abuse.
Zelda never owned much jewelry, just a wedding ring, cameo pin, “delicate gold chain” (17), and gold watch, and all but the wedding ring once belonged to her mother. The chain’s delicacy symbolizes Zelda herself, with her golden hair and her youthful innocence that was so early crushed by Aldo’s brutality. She was just 17 when they married, and he was 10 years her senior. Polo remembers her being often covered in bruises, and she was only allowed to leave the house to go to the doctor. Zelda could not fight Aldo, and this reduced her to tears that went on for years, demonstrating the helplessness that was so overwhelming she tried to take her own life and that of her unborn child. She was young, naïve, and fragile, her purity and sensitivity symbolized by the delicate design of the gold necklace.
Though Bubbe claims Zelda would want her to have the jewelry, Lila disagrees, and when she goes to college, Lila takes all but the wedding ring. She gives the pin and watch to Clara but “kept the necklace. She wore it all the time, never taking it off. In moments of distraction, she would run her fingers along the delicate links” (19). This gesture indicates that Lila did have an inner life in which she assiduously avoided indulging to protect herself from the past. Grace noted, even as a young child, Lila’s habit of playing with the chain whenever her mind was engaged elsewhere. Later, when Grace marries, Joe gives her this necklace, something that belonged to her great-grandmother, then her grandmother, then her mother, and now her. In this way, the necklace functions as a motif that highlights the Inescapability of maternal legacies. Lila must have had some sentimental reason for taking it because she never sold it and always wore it, despite her preference for switchblades over jewels. Joe seems to understand this, and giving the necklace to Grace indicates his belief that she has developed a more accurate and compassionate understanding of her mother.
The Lost Mother
Grace’s novel is a symbol that represents her. She calls it an “amalgam, a hybrid. It’s a novel with intuited facts from real life” (89). In the text, Grace includes many facts as well as other events she completely made up. Likewise, Grace herself is an amalgam; she refers to her “magpie brain” that observes and tucks things away, but she also comes to conclusions and makes judgments that are often incorrect. For example, she observes how Lila spent longer and longer days at the office, even sleeping there sometimes. Then, in the novel, she concocts an affair between Lila and Doug. Although Lila and Doug did sleep together once, they never developed romantic feelings or engaged in a romantic relationship. Grace’s book combines fact and fiction the same way her brain does; she has no facts to support her belief that Zelda didn’t die, and she does not research to find out the truth before the book’s publication. She also sees Lila through the eyes of a victim, a daughter who didn’t get the mother she wanted or deserved. It takes longer for her to realize her mother’s strength and her own good fortune.
However, the novel is also a motif that highlights The Inescapability of Maternal Legacies and The Importance of Women’s Personal and Professional Fulfillment. As the fictionalized story of her mother and grandmother, the book represents Grace’s attempt to come to terms with their identities and choices. That she feels the need to do this by authoring a text that would capture the attention of the public and highlight her writerly ambitions indicates not only her personal need to grapple with and understand her mother’s (and grandmother’s) legacy but also to fulfill her professional aspirations.
Bubbe’s Box
Clara sends Grace a box of Bubbe’s things, and this box is a motif that points to the inescapability of maternal legacies. Grace has a hard time opening it, telling herself she “can’t bear to look at it” and pushing it into a corner until Xander comes to visit (266). For many years, Grace prefers to believe that Zelda survived the Eloise and escaped to live a second, happier life. After Lila’s death and her request that Grace investigate the truth, however, Grace begins to hope that Zelda did die. She feels that Zelda would be a “monster” to save herself and leave her children behind with the abusive Aldo. Seeing Zelda’s things, however, will humanize her in a way that Grace has never experienced. When Xander opens the box, Grace must come to terms with seeing Zelda as a person rather than simply a topic on which she can disagree with Lila or as her mother’s “monstrous” mother. The box contains photos and other memorabilia, including items that once belonged to Lila. They find the children’s book, The Secret Garden, which Lila cared enough about to check out a dozen times and eventually steal from the library. Lila becomes much more human for Grace because of this box as well.
Just as Grace cannot escape the knowledge that she harmed people she loves with her book, she cannot escape her growing understanding that she has long underestimated her mother’s love and intentions. Nothing is as black or white as it once seemed to Grace, and Bubbe’s box preserves the humanity of Zelda and Lila in ways that Grace struggles with because it brings her face-to-face with her own shortcomings and mistakes. She’s long been keenly aware of her mother’s shortcomings, but Bubbe’s box helps her to understand Lila (and Zelda) in new ways.
The Pathologization of Women
The novel repeatedly explores how women’s emotional distress, trauma responses, and defiance of societal expectations are pathologized—labeled as mental illness, weakness, or dysfunction—rather than acknowledged as valid reactions to oppression. This motif ties into The Impact of Unresolved Trauma and the inescapability of maternal legacies, showing how generations of women in Grace’s family are silenced, dismissed, or punished under the guise of medical or social intervention.
Zelda is the most overt example of this pattern. Trapped in an abusive marriage to Aldo, she is effectively imprisoned in her home, only allowed to leave for medical appointments. Her emotional suffering is framed as instability, and rather than receiving support or escape, she is forcibly committed to the Eloise Asylum. Her depression, likely stemming from years of emotional and physical abuse, is not seen as a response to trauma but as a personal failing, justifying her removal from the family. Aldo’s ability to hospitalize her underscores how easily men can control and discard women under the pretense of concern for their mental health. Zelda’s story echoes historical patterns of women being deemed “hysterical” when their emotions or autonomy became inconvenient.
Lila, too, is framed as emotionally deficient. Because she is not a nurturing, traditionally maternal figure, Grace perceives her as cold and incapable of love. Society—and even Grace herself—expects women to be self-sacrificing caregivers, and Lila’s unwillingness to conform to this expectation makes her seem unnatural. However, Lila’s avoidance of vulnerability and emotional expression is a trauma response shaped by her own childhood abuse and abandonment. Her refusal to perform emotional labor does not mean she is unfeeling; rather, it is her form of survival.
Grace herself is also subjected to pathologization, though in a subtler way. Her sharp edges, ambition, and skepticism mark her as “difficult” in ways that parallel how Zelda was seen as unstable and Lila as unmotherly. Unlike Zelda, who was hospitalized, or Lila, who was judged for prioritizing work over caregiving, Grace has more freedom to exist as she is—but she is still scrutinized. The fact that she writes The Lost Mother suggests that she, too, has internalized the idea that the women in her family must be either victims or villains.
The motif of pathologization extends beyond individual characters to reflect a broader critique of how women’s struggles are often medicalized or dismissed instead of addressed. Zelda was not severely mentally ill, Lila was not unloving, and Grace is not broken. Instead, they are all women who found ways to survive in a world that tried to define them through their supposed deficiencies rather than their strengths.
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