I learned when to keep quiet. As a child I navigated seas of eggshells, wary of my mother’s offhanded insults, my father’s temper, and my older brother’s bullying. I could never satisfy my parents, could never pacify them when I failed to meet their expectations. Yet they frequently lauded my brother. It’s no wonder that years later, my parents wouldn’t help keep their son accountable for his recent cruelty, refusing to hear––let alone to acknowledge––what exactly had happened between us. My mother insisted it was our business, not hers. Even as an adult I didn’t push back, slipping instead into the silence I’d kept so often in that old household.

Then I woke one morning to an empty bank account. My parents had taken my money without a word, whilst preparing to hand it over to a scammer. For once I didn’t keep quiet.

 “I wonder why it is,” I said, “that when it comes to asking you for help keeping my abusive brother accountable, you tell me, ‘You’re a full-grown, married woman. Deal with it yourself.’ But when it comes to my own bank account, I’m apparently not able to handle it.”

The incident partially demonstrated that when it came to shouldering my trauma, my mother would rather step aside; at the same time, she refused to treat me like a stable adult. Margaret, the protagonist of Honor Jones’ debut novel, Sleep, experiences a similar predicament. My favorite novels tend to leave me reeling, and Sleep certainly packs a punch. The novel is an unflinching portrayal of familial conflict, particularly between a mother and daughter. It hit awfully close to home.

Sleep begins with ten-year-old Margaret in her suburban home, enjoying sunny summer days of sleepovers and games. But ultimately, her mother Elizabeth’s emotional instability coupled with her older brother Neal’s vile intrusiveness overshadow it all. The remainder of the novel follows Margaret as a thirty-five-year-old, still recouping from that fateful summer while navigating motherhood, divorce, and newfound love. Throughout her book, Jones adeptly explores the consequences of warped roles between mother and daughter. Young Margaret must ceaselessly cater to Elizabeth’s whims and needs, while an adult Margaret struggles to assert herself against an elderly Elizabeth. Keeping her childhood trauma quiet solely to appease her mother consequently makes it difficult to prove her autonomy as an adult.

Even at the outset of the novel, it’s crystal clear that Margaret’s mother favors her older brother. “Elizabeth loved him more because he was so unlikable. That was just the kind of thing that mothers did.” It goes beyond Elizabeth preferring one child over the other. She tends to hone her capricious outbursts against Margaret specifically. A simple shopping trip is laced with passive aggressive barbs towards Margaret, whereas her brother gets his own shoes without fuss. “When she’s being a little mean to me, I think she’s having fun, [Margaret] thought but did not say. She wouldn’t betray Elizabeth, not even to Neal.” At the tender age of ten, Margaret is already conscientious of her own silence. Unlike most children, she does not need to be told to keep quiet but willfully does so as a favor to her mother, whom she feels equally required to protect and to pacify.

Margaret’s silence is motivated by a sticky combination: fear of her mother’s volatility and fear for her mother’s well-being. In one incident Elizabeth blames Margaret for her older brother’s prank calls, pinning her against the wall and yelling so forcibly that Margaret’s head repeatedly bangs against the wall. She only stops after Neal’s friend Danny confesses to the prank, and leaves her daughter without a word. Elizabeth repeatedly proves to be a force to be reckoned with, a woman who always wins her arguments because few are willing to challenge her. No one wants to see her snap and break from the tailored, immaculate image she presents to the public eye. Despite Elizabeth’s tectonic mood shifts, Margaret loves her mother and does her utmost to make her happy. More than that, she takes it upon herself to guard her mother’s mental state. Margaret determines this after learning about Elizabeth’s attempted suicide: “‘I wasn’t in my right mind,’ Elizabeth had said when she told Margaret about the pills. It hadn’t occurred to Margaret before then that you had more than one mind to be in. It was now something that she worried about: protecting…the right mind of Elizabeth.” Unfortunately, protecting Elizabeth often means that Margaret must suffer in her stead.

During that fateful summer, ten-year-old Margaret discovers a mysterious hole in her bathroom wall––and within it, a video camera. When she hides the camera and soon finds Neal searching for it, Margaret realizes exactly whom it belongs to. She prepares to tell Elizabeth, imagining how her mother would protect her and send Neal away to boarding school. Instead, Elizabeth finds cartoons on the video camera, then lets her son take it away. Margaret is on her own.

Elizabeth hadn’t rewound the tape, so now they would never know what was on it. Whatever happened next, no one was going to protect her. Too late, Margaret understood what Elizabeth’s expression had meant. She had been asking for help, pleading with Margaret, just this once, for a really big favor. She’d been saying, Please don’t make me look.

Going forward, Margaret keeps her secrets to herself for Elizabeth’s sake.