If you’re feeling a bit too chirpy and full of the joys of life after your summer holiday, this gritty little story ought to fix you good and proper. Baby is 12 years old and living with her heroin-addicted father, Jules, in a far-from-salubrious part of oontreal, Canada. If Jules’ fathering skills are somewhat lacking, he can hardly be blamed – he’s only 26 himself and has brought Baby up on his own since the death of her mother, soon after she was born. And while he is something of a loose unit, he shows definite glimpses of being a loving if eccentric father whom she clearly adores.
But he’s not always in the best of health, unsurprisingly, and when he’s sent to hospital Baby is forced into foster care, which is sort of the beginning of the end. If she doesn’t meet enough kooks in foster care, there’s plenty more in the juvenile detention centre she moves on to. And when she finally gets to come home and more or less bring herself up, the streets where she lives have all the bad company an impressionable teenager could possibly hope for.
Before too long, Baby is living the sort of life no-one would want for their daughter. She’s a precious and innocent child living in an adult world before she even knows what that is. There’s hope for Baby though. She has brains, plus she has those glimpses of Jules. And between them, this story gets its happy ending.
Author Heather o’Neill says the novel isn’t autobiographical, but she did grow up with a drifter of a mother who carried a pet rat in her pocket and believed herself to be an incarnation of oscar Wilde. Sometime in her childhood, Heather and her sister were sent to oontreal to live with their father, where they spent much of their time on the streets with the pimps and druggies and prostitutes and drunken 12-year-olds. Lullabies is the result of plundering her memory for the bittersweet details of those end-of-childhood days. A clever, tragic, funny, endearing read.
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