My Mother Says

When good advice is all you need

The narrator’s long-term girlfriend has just broken things off, forcing her to move back in with her father, a Pink Floyd–loving priest. While she desperately tries to convince her girlfriend to reconsider, the rest of the world bombards her with advice: from her childhood friend Mulle to her kindly therapist to her overbearing mother and card-playing father. Bumbling through the fog of disillusionment, the narrator gives herself permission to grieve, philosophize, and be generally outrageous until at last she sees a light at the end of the tunnel. My Mother Says is a compendium of conversations between people who talk past one another in a universe of misplaced good intentions. In this whirlwind of memories, confessions, temper tantrums, and declarations of love, Pilgaard’s sheer affection for her characters turns the pain of a broken heart into a heartwarming comedy of errors.

“A novel about language and communication, dialogue versus monologue, and community versus loneliness.”
Stavanger Aftenblad

“Pilgaard writes bravely, without hesitation, and with a sarcasm and subtle humor that shines through the book’s many conversations.” Fyens Stifstidende

Author
“My Mother Says is not so much about falling out of love, but rather about the great tangle of emotions that comes with a breakup. Inside the rupture of a breakup are thousands of other ruptures, all activating each other, as if every parting links to every other parting, like a domino effect. As I see it, humans have two different ways of approaching each other: through language and through body. I have great faith in language, but I also sometimes doubt its efficacy. I believe one remembers with the body, that the body’s experiences go a long way to making us who we are. As if the body is a memory palace where we store our memories and that they move and come alive when we experience something that stirs them.”

Translator
“Part temper tantrum and part surrealist meditation on the passage of time, My Mother Says is an exercise in tonal dissonance: it is the sound of our young heroine’s bratty nonchalance pounding into the shores of adulthood, with its attendant mundanity and loss. But there is poetry in that loss, and the central challenge of translating the novel was to be faithful to our heroine’s multiplicity, as she stamps her feet in frustration while at the same time paying heartfelt tribute to all people who shaped her life thus far.”

Publisher
“Stine Pilgaard is a literary sensation in Denmark, and it is my pleasure to introduce her fantastic novels to English-language readers―reading Pilgaard’s work is such a joyful experience! The protagonist in My Mother Says is struggling with things we all have been through―the break-up of her relationship, followed by all sorts of well-meant advice from her mother and others who know what’s best for her. Pilgaard’s sense of humor and sharp eye for people’s tendency to talk past one another make reading her work a feast of recognition.”

Stine Pilgaard is a graduate of the Danish Writers’ Academy and the University of Copenhagen. Her first novel, My Mother Says, was a critical and commercial success in Denmark, securing its author the Bodil and Jørgen Munch-Christensen Award and earning a nomination for the prestigious Danish Broadcasting Corporation Literature Prize. The Land of Short Sentences, also published by World Editions, was an instant bestseller and critics’ favorite. It won the prestigious Weekendavisen Literature Prize and the Danish Booksellers’ Association’s Golden Laurels award.