When Lisa Selby was 10 months old, her mother Helen dropped her off at the babysitter’s and never came back. In this frank, intimate and incredibly moving documentary, we watch Selby interviewing her mum, a heroin addict and alcoholic, dying of cancer. In her filthy basement flat in south London, cans of Special Brew on the table, Helen answers her daughter’s questions. Are you maternal? “No! I’m terrible! I’m not a responsible parent.”
As a child, Selby idolised her beautiful, glamorous absent mother. Twice a year, on birthdays and Christmas, cards arrived with Helen’s “autograph”; “she was better than Madonna to me,” says Selby. In a beautifully written voiceover she speaks with painful honesty about the feeling of longing she’s never been able to shake off. She wonders if she can be a mother herself, or if it would be better to break the cycle. “Mum: the word that doesn’t feel good. It’s not my word.”
