Emotional Neglect

Running on Empty

Jonice Webb · 2012

Webb coined the term childhood emotional neglect, and this is the book that gives the experience a name. Her argument is that what harms people is not only what was done to them but what was never done: nobody asked, nobody noticed, nobody helped them work out what they were feeling. Because nothing happened, there is no story to point at, which is exactly why so many people arrive in their thirties or forties convinced they have no right to feel as flat as they do. Start here.

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout · 2016

Lucy is in a New York hospital and her mother, whom she has not seen in years, arrives and sits at the end of the bed for five days talking about people from home. What is not said is the entire novel. Strout writes the particular ache of a parent who has come, who does love you, and who cannot manage the sentence you have been waiting for since childhood. Short, plain and devastating, and the best fiction there is on this.

The Emotionally Absent Mother

Jasmin Lee Cori · 2010

Cori works through the things a mother is supposed to provide — a sense of being seen, a source of comfort, a mirror — and what happens later when one of them was missing. She is careful not to turn this into a prosecution; a good deal of the book is about mothers who were themselves unmothered and doing their best with nothing. The chapters on how the gap shows up in adult relationships are the ones people tend to underline.

Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 2014

A mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio loses its middle daughter, and Ng works backwards through a household where every person has been quietly carrying something nobody asked about. The novel is really about what happens to children who are loved as projects rather than met as people. If you grew up as the one who was doing well and therefore needed nothing, this will be uncomfortably recognisable.

What My Bones Know

Stephanie Foo · 2022

Foo was a successful radio producer having panic attacks in the office when she was diagnosed with complex PTSD, and this is her account of working out where it came from and what could actually be done. She is very good on the difference between the trauma that happened and the ordinary daily absence of care that ran alongside it, and equally good on how uneven and expensive getting help turns out to be. Funny in places, which helps.

Shuggie Bain

Douglas Stuart · 2020

Shuggie is a small boy in 1980s Glasgow looking after his alcoholic mother, and Stuart writes the reversal — the child doing the noticing, the child managing the adult — without ever making it sentimental. It is a hard book and worth being warned about. It is here because the parentified child is one of the commonest shapes emotional neglect takes, and because Shuggie’s love for his mother is never in question, which is the part that outsiders find hardest to understand.

Mother Hunger

Kelly McDaniel · 2021

McDaniel separates out three things a mother provides — nurturance, protection and guidance — and looks at what is missing when one or more of them was not there. The framework is useful because it lets people be specific instead of concluding they simply had a bad childhood or, more often, that they had no right to complain about a perfectly adequate one. Short, and structured so you can read only the part that applies.