A Working Mother

A mordant, cautionary tale about a working-class woman hemmed in on all sides, written by “the most unfairly neglected of all Scottish authors” (Alasdair Gray, author of Poor Things).

“I’ve got a job,” I told Adam.

“Good for you. I can now relinquish all responsibility for this household then?”

“And I can save up for a divorce.”

“So, let’s celebrate,” said Adam.

Discovered by three of Scotland’s most celebrated writers, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Liz Lochhead, when they were visiting a local writers’ workshop in the late 1970s, Agnes Owens—then in her 50s—claimed she’d joined the group just to “get out of the house.” She had grown up in a working-class family outside Glasgow, done badly at school, and had worked in factories, as a cleaner, and as an occasional typist. When she published her highly acclaimed first novel at the age of 58, it launched a most unexpected literary career.

Nowhere is Owens’s black humor and attention to the surreal banalities and frustrations of ordinary existence better showcased than in her third novel, A Working Mother. Our beleaguered heroine is Betty, beset by her depressed, alcoholic war-vet husband Adam and their smart-mouthed kids. Neither an affair with Adam’s attractive friend Brendan (a disappointment), nor her new job as a typist (for a leerer with roving hands) can lift her out of the rut. Is it any wonder she’s taken to the bottle now too?

As Megan Nolan writes in the foreword to this new edition, in a “shrewd and ironic style” that is all Owens’s own, A Working Mother proves that “any given life rewards intelligent attention when it is as fine and as funny and incandescent as hers.”