Imagined Spaces celebrates essaying as trials, attempts and adventures in thinking in all their creative modes.

I have been thinking about unmothering of late… as a slow process of just letting your daughter be in the path she chooses to tread. But being made redundant is hard; what happens to my identity as mother when my child no longer wants to be mothered?… I watched The Eternal Daughter and some of the issues it explores made me think of the mother-daughter relationship in quite a different way. What happens when you foreground the daughter and not the mother? What happens when the ‘you’ as ‘mother’ is not self-indulgently centre stage….

American Fiction is screening at the DCA until the 22 February. Based on Percival Everett’s 2001 satirical novel, Erasure, it follows Thelonious "Monk" Ellison at a crisis point in his life. Ellison is a published African American novelist who is critically but not commercially successful. He writes literary and esoteric novels such as a retelling of the story of Euripides, and a parody of the work of French Post-Structuralists. His agent tells him that he needs instead to write a ‘black’ book to which he replies in exasperation, ‘I am black, and this is my book!’

I’ve come out of the DCA cinema today puzzled and frustrated. The Zone of Interest, a film about the Höss family living next to Auschwitz, is perhaps the least pleasurable of the screenings I’ve been to of late, even as it has also seemed the most necessary. Representations of the Holocaust have to surmount the sometimes insurmountable: how to represent a historical event that seems unimaginable, unbearable and incomprehensible in its horror and magnitude, a primal wounding as it were to our understanding of what it means to be human.