The Mother in the Mirror

Review of The Need by Helen Phillips (USA: Simon and Schuster, 2019)
By Ilyas Lukman

As a child, I watched my mother work at being a parent in an unsavory atmosphere—the unflattering smells, the inexplicable stickiness, and the occasional blanket command for silence in the midst of several incessant tiny voices rising up together. Although I helped with some of the less laborious tasks that came with rearing my siblings, it is only in adulthood, on looking back, that I come to realize the full extent of the experience—the way it constantly bears down on body, mind, and soul, the way it takes out so much of you. Motherhood, specifically, is a thankless trial demanding one’s fullest attention as one’s faculties are split between a hundred different immediate crises involving several helpless bodies—and it is done every day, in different places, by different women from all over.

Helen Phillips’ novel The Need is dedicated to exploring the undercurrent of terror that comes with parenthood. Protagonist Molly Nye is a scientist in her thirties, balancing her career in paleontology with the responsibilities that come with raising two young children in the absence of a partner to support her. David, her husband, travels for work—leaving Molly alone to handle her children along with household duties and her own job. Throughout the novel, which is divided into five parts, we see her juggle these elements through her narrative: her stream of consciousness is constantly interrupted by her children, whose needs require attention, whether they are verbalized or not. Molly’s thoughts are clouded, in her own words maddened/melted, as the story progresses. Her work takes her to a particular dig site where, together with various plant specimens of note, several mysterious items are pulled out of the earth—the most notable of them being a Bible that uses feminine pronouns in its description of God. This discovery sets forth a chain of events that brings her to meet face-to-face her doppelganger—aptly named Moll.

We begin the novel in the grip of a crisis—one of the worst fears of a parent—a home intrusion; the untouchable sanctuary is compromised. The chapters in the first part of the book swing back and forth from the pressing danger in the present, to the moments leading up to the breach; the flashbacks depict Molly’s life away from the domestic chaos of motherhood, that is, her routines as scientist, co-worker, museum guide. Sometimes it is in the most harrowing moments that we keep receiving flashes of past normalcy. Perhaps this is our way of reaching back to a safe space, at least on a mental plane, a subconscious method to aid survival. Or else the body’s call to return to knowable, predictable flesh, to save us from the perilous present.

This call, given form by Phillips through the imagery of milk, recurs throughout the novel. Molly’s supply of milk beads out from her body in moments of intense emotion—keen distress, rising panic, implacable longing—which catch Molly off-guard in their intensity. The involuntary production of milk is steeped in the wisdom of the body separate from the active mind—here, she is most acutely aware of her physical nature and impulses, stripped of the trappings of her modern life. It is here that we are presented with a part of the narrative that speaks of the Mother as a primal force. Molly’s body, in all its physicality, is framed as a vessel that primarily serves her young. Phillips describes this forfeit of autonomy in a manner that milk-bearing parents may find all too familiar:

So though she was too tired, though it felt like her breasts were currently the common property of the family (sucked by the baby in hunger; sucked by the child in jest, in imitation of the baby; sucked by the husband in desire; sucked, too, by the breast pump), she told David to carry Viv, intruder on their sleep, back to her own bed.

The repetition of the participial phrase “sucked by” in Molly’s internal monologue expresses powerfully her exasperation at the exhausting daily routine she endures. While there is no doubt much love in the act of feeding, there is the unmistakable irritation at the constant demand on Molly’s time, body, and attention throughout the novel. Her precocious children teeter on the edge of being burdensome, always a hair’s breadth away from perils such as broken glass or head-cracking heights, when they are not demanding endlessly for snacks. These constant demands shape not only the rhythm of her psyche but also the contour of her life; they perform an endless mental and physical loop—until, in a reality-breaking halt, she meets herself. We mean this in a literal sense—Molly Nye encounters Moll, who hails from another time, the very same home intruder from the beginning of the novel. Moll’s origins are steeped in the mystery of the archaeological dig where Molly works, from the same warped reality as the pronoun-shifted Bible she finds.

Molly is understandably on edge—how else would one confront one’s own duplicate? Her thoughts draw back to the safety of her children—the responsibility of motherhood translates into an almost electric undercurrent of trepidation as she deals with the familiar newcomer in her life. Would this doppelganger attempt to usurp her position in her own life? The fierce protector that lies dormant in all parents springs to life, and we see the primal watchfulness in Phillip’s writing, the wide-eyed wariness in Molly as she weighs her options. Her mind racing with speculations about Moll’s true motives, Molly watches her as Moll spends the day at the park with her children or lies awake in the darkness of the basement.

However, there are few schemes and machinations forthcoming from Moll. Her demands are simple: separated from her own family, she seeks only to return to some semblance of routine that Molly has. As the story progresses, Phillips is careful to have Molly alternate between acceptance and incredulity over the absurd situation; daily life normalizes the extraordinary intrusion even when the intrusion has disrupted the day-to-day. It calls to mind Phillips’ inclusion of a quote from My Private Property by Mary Ruefle at the beginning of the novel:

We stood facing each other the way, when you come upon a deer unexpectedly, you both freeze for a moment, mutually startled, and in that exchange there seems to be but one glance, as if you and the other are sharing the same pair of eyes.

There is recognition of the self through the eyes of the other—Molly sees herself, in more ways than one, reflected back. It is to the point that Molly herself reads Moll’s emotions as though they were her own. Phillips weaves an unsteady camaraderie between Molly and Moll through the all-too-often isolating experience of motherhood. Thus begins a precarious dance—as the two balance their now-shared, double life. Phillips takes this delicate balance to its furthest end in the climax of the novel, as Molly finds herself in the grip of yet another crisis with nobody but her other self to guide her through it. In the final bittersweet chapters, it is a mother who ultimately saves herself; it is she who offers herself deliverance.

The trope of the divine feminine echoes throughout the novel. As previously mentioned, one of the artefacts procured from Molly’s dig site is a copy of the Bible with a change in pronouns. This divine object foreshadows Moll’s appearance, one that draws upon the figure of Christ-as-Savior in her redemptive qualities. Moll becomes Molly’s saving grace from the self-cannibalizing nature of motherhood’s demands—she leads Molly to agree to share her life. Molly would divide her hours between her job and children, and Moll would take up the slack with the children. In essence, Moll becomes the ultimate provider—in healing others, she heals herself. Molly’s initial resistance is symbolic of the way that we often deny ourselves self-care. This resistance is slow to fade. Throughout the experiment, she thinks: is this allowed? is this permissible? is suffering not to be expected, even welcomed? Phillips beautifully breaks down these queries, melting down Molly’s resolve through the various ways in which she relents to receiving Moll’s help.

What stands out in The Need is that, while Molly does not reject her role in her household or her obligations to her family, she feels a persistent sense of dissatisfaction, a constant desire to seek a truth beyond what is offered. It is therefore rewarding to read how Molly, enveloped by an air of detachment necessary to undergo hardship, is slowly reawakened to the world by Moll’s appearance, shaken from daily routine into foreign territory. Now, the initial shock does eventually become automatic reactions to stimuli, much in the same way that responses to repeated domestic crises eventually become muscle memory. But Molly has evolved beyond dull acceptance to a new state of equilibrium, one that accommodates her own needs. Moll is Phillips’ deus ex machina for helping Molly meet her own needs as she meets the needs of those who depend on her.

This is, ultimately, a work of science fiction, and certain world-building questions about why and how the different worlds of Molly and Moll become connected are never quite answered. Molly is made to confront her own humanity through the glitch and to forge a new reality through the serendipity. In The Need, which functions in many ways like a hypothesis, Phillips has created a beautifully surreal tale of female solidarity in the face of the challenges of maternity. There is strength in finding that sort of unwavering connection within and without—and perhaps that is what we all really, truly need.


Ilyas Ahmad (b. 1992) is a performer, writer, and artist, with a strong focus in spoken word. His work revolves around relationships; the spaces between and surrounding politicized bodies; love and his experiences with gender; Islam; and his Malay identity in a local context. Ilyas' work has often been described as candid, raw, and occasionally grotesque.