A Book My Mother Gave Me: The Thorn Birds

My mother’s birthday would have been later this week, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about her. One of the things I think about is all the books we read and discussed. Both of us loved reading all our lives, from the time we first could read until, in my mother’s case, when she could no longer retain what she read.

One of my mother’s favorite books was The Thorn Birds, a novel set in Australia by Colleen McCullough. The book was published in 1977, and my mother read it not long after its publication. She raved about the novel and recommended I read it. I don’t recall how quickly I read it (it’s a long book and I was working a furious schedule at the time), but I think my mother and I talked about it sometime around 1980. I definitely read it before the miniseries was aired, and that was in 1983.

The Thorn Birds is a rollicking family saga about a sheep-farming family in the Australian outback, and it centers on relationships between the family members, as well as on their relationships with a Catholic priest in the neighborhood named Father Ralph. In particular, there is a growing friendship between Father Ralph and a young daughter in the family named Meggie. As Meggie grows up, their relationship threatens to become sexual, but after Father Ralph spurns her, Meggie marries another man. Later, however, Meggie and Father Ralph have an affair which is a turning point for the rest of the novel.

I was shocked that my mother liked this book so much. After all, she was a devout Catholic. After I read it, I thought she would be scandalized by the relationship between Meggie and Father Ralph. I’d read many sagas involving extramarital affairs, and I thought I was fairly sophisticated about books with such plots. But this novel with the affair between Meggie and a priest scandalized me.

And my mother? That she would like such a book? I was surprised, to say the least.

Maybe part of my surprise was the fact that my mother would discuss a novel with such adult themes with me. I was twenty-four in 1980, three years married and a year out of graduate school. I hadn’t lived at home since I was seventeen, then too young to discuss extramarital affairs. But now that I was a married woman of twenty-four, perhaps Mother thought we could discuss the book as equals. This may have been the first time my mother and I had an adult conversation about the merits of a novel’s plot and characters, other than English literature stand-bys such as Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre.

As I reflect now—forty years later—on our discussion, I wonder if we would have liked the book so much if we read it today. In 1980, there was little to no discussion of clergy sexual abuse. At the time, my mother and I knew a priest who had left the Church to marry a woman, but we didn’t know anything about priests abusing children. The story in The Thorn Birds of Meggie and Father Ralph could be viewed as the priest grooming this young girl through her childhood, something we didn’t think about four decades ago.

My mother kept a copy of The Thorn Birds with her until her death in 2014. It was one of the books on the small bookcase in her room at the assisted living facility where she lived her last eighteen months. But she no longer read it. By 2011 or so, she could no longer retain what she read. She knew the words, but by the time she had read a few pages, her dementia caused her to forget what she had read. The story no longer meant anything to her.

Still, as I think about books my mother and I read and discussed, The Thorn Birds is near the top of the list. It evokes a time when we began to relate as adult women, when I was no longer just her daughter, but now a friend and peer.

And it also evokes her later years, when she receded from being a woman who loved books, when she could no longer enjoy their stories. Our relationship by that time had come full circle—she was no longer caring for me as her child, but I was helping to care for her.

What books have special memories for you?