A really honest and poignant memoir - beautifully written and it was a privilege to learn more about this amazing woman's life.

A daughter of a mother who finds life with her child full of conflicting ideals. Nothing is good enough but also don’t stand out.. A childhood into adulthood finds Deborah struggling with a complicated mother . If you are a daughter this may be you, if you have a daughter read and learn.

I was approved for this shortly after Deborah's death and while I was keen to read, I didn't get around to it initially. I'm so glad I have now had the chance to read it.

Beautifully honest and engaging. An utterly brilliant, fascinating, thought provoking, poignant read.

A moving, engrossing and powerful memoir where the author explores her conflicting responses to her upbringing in Scotland. Stayed with me long after I finished reading.

I don't usually read memoirs but chose this book because I was also brought up in Motherwell albeit 10 years earlier. I found it a difficult book to read because there was a lot of 'jumping about' which made it difficult to follow. The author seems a troubled soul obsessed with narcissism and although there were many references to Motherwell at that time, this book was about the author's relationship with her parents pre and post death. she appears to have had a very troubled and traumatic life which I found it difficult to identify with as it did not appear to me to be typical . I did enjoy recognising descriptions of places and events which I remembered well. the author is obviously a very erudite lady but I didn't see the need for her choice of vocabulary which most people would not understand.

When memoirs are great, they are breath-taking. And what makes a good memoir? For me, honesty, revelation and one that can capture how the individual life fits into wider social changes. That’s what I’m after. I want the personal, yes, but when it brings to life the experiences of a community too, that’s when you know you’re on to something special. And Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr, is very special indeed.

Now, I can’t claim to be too familiar with Deborah’s work as a journalist, so it wasn’t that which drew me to this; more, it was what Deborah was exploring.

Born and raised in Lanarkshire in Scotland, Deborah lived in a working-class community decisively shaped by the nearby steelworks. The cradle of Labour and betrayed by Thatcher, Motherwell was also a community blighted by sectarianism.

And all of this provides the backdrop and the context to Deborah’s childhood. But whilst all this impacted the home, Deborah’s focus in her memoir is critically centred around her fractious, at times even toxic, relationship she had with her parents, and specifically her mother, Win.

“For a time, it felt like only sexual abuse and serious neglect could have a negative psychological impact on a child. A psycho analyst told me, when I was fifty-five, that it was the little things that you needed to watch out for…”

Deborah’s writing is blindingly good. She captures in her mother a woman so at odds with herself, caught up in ‘keeping up appearances’, battling with a lack of agency yet, all the while, misdirecting all her bitterness and anger towards her only daughter. It’s a distressing observation on narcissism and self-loathing, but it also reflects the wider societal battles for women then and now: for Win, her life had to revolve around her husband and when she found that her daughter wanted a freer life, it shook her to her core.

Yet Motherwell is not a depressing book. In places, it’s even brilliantly charming and funny (“We had our own sink, in the kitchen-cum-living room. Open-plan, as it’s called today.”) but it is also immensely profound.

Sadly, Deborah is no longer with us, having died from cancer last year, but her memoir is a brilliant legacy. It is an extraordinarily good memoir.

I can see objectively that this is a wonderful book, reflective yet forthright and unsentimental. The writing is sharp, evocative and honest; Deborah Orr was clearly an engaging, intelligent and hugely fascinating person, and it's very sad that there will not be books and books of hers to come. That said, I'm really sorry to say that this book wasn't for me personally. I wanted so much to love it and was so excited to have the opportunity to read it, but I found it quite meandering and slow-moving, and wished the narrative had been more linear. Part of the problem was that this was pitched to me as a story of a mother/daughter relationship, whereas actually it's much more a depiction of a specific '60s and '70s socio-economic class and the life of an ordinary family. It's not an easy or a fun book - and why should it be? But I can't honestly say I enjoyed reading it.

‘Motherwell’, Deborah Orr’s memoir of her formative years in this town and her later escape to university and beyond, is a searing, honest and incredibly moving account of a child of the 60s and teenager of the 70s. Many of the political references and domestic detail cast me back to my own, albeit different, youth and, for these details alone, this may well be a fascinating read for our children’s generation as well. How they might wonder at our naivety, our pleasure over the most basic of toys, the knowledge that we had to make our own entertainment day in, day out!
But this is not an account seen through the haze of rose-tinted spectacles. Deborah Orr wipes away any nostalgic miasma firmly and effectively. Instead, the lens are polished ferociously and her troubled relationship with her family laid bare. However, neither is this a misery memoir in the expected sense. Orr is loved by her parents; they encourage her in her interests and are proud of her academic achievements – as long as they fit in with their world view. She is to stay at home, keeping her mother company until she marries and has a family of her own. Many younger readers will be amazed that this Victorian attitude prevailed into the 1980s. However, it was not so unusual, particularly for working families living in close-knit communities, many of whom had scant opportunity for change.
Whilst it is hard to stomach the everyday little cruelties dealt Orr as she began to fashion a life for herself, it is really uplifting to read how she slowly manages to become an independent woman involved in work that she loves. It is even more incredible to see her quest for the truth as she re-visits the parenting she received, and its effect on her and her brother, her parents’ relationship, and why her own relationships were so often toxic. Much of this is explored through her understanding of narcissism which leads on to her argument for its prevalence in the West.
This is an engrossing and thought-provoking read: moving, shocking, funny and uplifting. What a tragedy that they are amongst her final words in print.
My thanks to NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

An amazing book. So sad that this first memoir is her swan song but what a read. An absolute must for anyone who’s ever had narcissistic parents or partners. I didn’t have the former, but I’ve had some of the latter and the moments of recognition were truly shocking. This woman could write.