The Lost Daughter is a portrait of mother-daughter dynamics in which the struggle of being either is the emphasis. Given such a premise, the women in the narrative are experiencing new motherhood or are resolving their relationship with their mothers. The protagonist, Leda, is a middle-aged mother of two adult daughters who has to confront her unsettled past. Her childhood had a huge impact on her mothering experience that involved unconventional choices, a fact she keeps reliving in the present. The novel illustrates an aspect of motherhood that is rarely focused on yet is a significant issue when raising children: the conflict between freedom and responsibility.
On a vacation in Greece, Leda is free to unwind—since her adult daughters have started their own lives—but her past comes to haunt her. While observing the Neapolitan family their lives trigger old memories about her mother and her time as a young mother. The chain of occurrences at the beach causes Leda to face her anxieties about abandonment and separation. The threats that the mother will leave them would become Leda’s own undoing in the future when she did it to her two daughters. This same anxiety resurfaces observing the young family as she thinks Nina has the proclivity to do the same. Even though Leda proceeded with the choice to leave her children and later have a career, the guilt rematerializes through the new obsession with this family.
The doll, Nani, acts as a symbol of the obsession, unresolved past, and inadequacies about parenthood. Though attaining a sense of liberty has been the goal, the difficulty of her past mothering experience breaks the surface unexpectedly. Leda harbors a need to correct the relationships of others in the hopes it puts to rights the damage and her unhappy childhood. Kirkus Reviews wrote “Freedom versus responsibility: This tension underlies Leda’s behavior and ambivalence toward her daughters, which continues to the present.” The mother-daughter bond is painted as a complex dynamic that can fall on either side of the spectrum.
