Where I End

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Aoileann has little interaction with the other people on the island who treat her as accursed ( The taint is something unique to me, I have learned. The islanders call it scáth suarach anama. Soul-stench), except when sometimes men come across her in a deserted location when they casually rape her, treating her as an object in rather the way she thinks about her mother. Deploying sub-genres and trope references like Swallow, Gore & More! and Final Girl in shouty B-movie fonts to theme her sections is clever. White uses these as a springboard into the weighty issues typically explored in horror, themes like death, madness, grief and addiction, all of which she has harrowing first-hand experience of.

Her seventh book and fifth novel, My Hot Friend (Hachette, 2023) was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Teenager Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her newborn son move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love... When the local wool factory is deemed by the mainlanders as ripe for redevelopment and investment, Aoileann’s grandmother is employed to collate her remembrances of the island, which means she now leaves Aoileann alone with her mother. Aoileann sees this as a way for her to spy on Rachel, to ingratiate herself into her lfe so that she will become indispensible to her, and this where the novel becomes even more unsettling as events spiral and twist in ways you cannot possibly imagine. Sophie White (born 1985) is an Irish author, journalist and podcaster. She is the co-host of the podcasts Mother of Pod and The Creep Dive.

If I’m writing a first draft, I write from six to eight in the morning,” she says. “I work to word counts […] it’s a lot about just getting it down and getting it in place. And then I do so much editing.” She is "large and generous, spilling and quivering", an archetypal depiction of a mother. In Rachel, Aoileann finds a source of all kinds of affection she’s been deprived and soon devises a nefarious and perverse plan to tie herself to Rachel for as long as possible.

The pair live by their own warped Girl Code, maintaining an image of unflappable edginess. They perform the role of clued-in cool girls, making sure to "eat around people" as "diets weren’t on trend any more". Lexi swaps out meals for detox juices and documents her gruelling, pseudo-mindful bootcamp gym classes on social media. The house in which Aoileann is at the furthest, least accessible, part of the island and its windows have been boarded up with stones. Aoileann lives with her paternal grandmother, an islander, who she calls Móraí, and her mother, originally from the mainland. But no-one on the island knows that her mother is there, believing her to have died around the time Aoileann was born, and she is bed-bound and dumb, seemingly in some form of permanent post-natal depression, and is treated by Aoileann and Móraí as little more than an animal, or perhaps, even worse an object. Good Jaysus! What the hell did I just read?! This review will be mainly about the unsettling vibes of Sophie White’s Where I End because discussing the plot would give too much away. But, also, if I explained the whole story, you wouldn’t believe me anyway. The novel is published by the wonderful small indy Tramp Press, who have labelled this, her fourth novel, as White's 'literary fiction debut', not without a little controversy (see below from an Irish Times interview).

Her mind begins to unravel under the strain of it all. ‘I go to bed and I drown in the horror of my own head’. In an earlier book, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown, White described an episode of drug-induced psychosis that she experienced in her twenties and the long-road to recovery afterward; ‘what nightmare had I willingly swallowed?’ Aoileann lives on the most rural part of a small, hostile island, cut off from the local community. Her paternal grandmother rules the roost; her shattered, guilt-ridden father comes and goes; and her mother - or what's left of her - lies bed-bound, silent, staring, gaping. They are survivors of a devastating catastrophe; an incident that has made them outcasts, despite being islanders themselves. I literally have my knitting in my bag right now. I would take it out if I didn’t think it was rude,” she says. The island hasn’t treated her kindly either. A trip to the beach recalls memories of island men "coming upon" her, violating her while cheered on by their friends.

They resentfully clean her and change her nappies, hurl insults at her, talk over her and treat her in ways that are incredibly emotionally difficult to read. and make us aware of how inhumane they are in their treatment. We are given no explicit reason as to what happened to Aoileann’s mother or why, but all we are witness to is the incredible anger and resentment that both women – but especially Aoileann have towards her. On the other end of the spectrum is Joanne, the first of her friend group to have a baby and struggling to make her friends accept that her circumstances have changed. Her baby shower descends into a bacchanal, with her friends snorting cocaine off her bump, while she cowers from her prenatal classes, afraid of facing up to her new reality. The only giveaway in My Hot Friend would be the searing honesty, and White’s astounding ability to chase down the uncomfortable and disturbing truths of living and painstakingly examine them. Where I End is an exceptionally unsettling but beautiful tale about the horrors that come in the every day for an isolated and stunted teenager called Aoileann. It's also about motherhood, the private disasters people endure, and the difference between living, surviving, and merely existing. The islanders use this word for all kinds of darkness. Muddy gloom and deep voids. They call the bottom of sea 'an ghrinneall dhorcha’, the dark bed.None of this sounds appealing, yet I could not stop reading. I almost missed a meeting because I needed to see how it ended. On a sentence level, Sophie White has crafted a literary horror story that snakes its way into your brain and will not leave. These characters are fictional, but I desperately want to know how things turned out for them all following the novel’s conclusion. That’s how immersive this book is and how brilliant a writer Sophie White is. A few of the missing appear to correspond to ‘graves’ and testimony from islanders claiming to be surviving family, would it seem, corroborate this. However, there are at least seven others entirely unaccounted for. I suppose I do think that we’re all produced very much by the environment that we grew up in, not just emotionally but geographically. […] I wanted to play with that.” As part of the mainland authority’s decision to try and boost tourism to the island with the addition of a new museum, a visiting artist, Rachel and her new-born baby Seamus, are allocated housing for a few weeks, so that she can prepare an opening exhibition of her work. Immediately Aoileann is smitten with the new mother, although she develops a very unhealthy obsession with her breastfeeding habits and begins to resent Seamus in a disturbing way. Rachel is so consumed by the tiredness of new motherhood and the need to produce her artwork apace, that she completely misses the signs of Aoileann’s conniving, lies and duplicity, which become life threatening as they grow in magnitude. Meanwhile Aoileann's father lives on the mainland and visits once a month and while he is aware of his wife's condition Aoileann and her grandmother put on a show that they take better care of her: