Postcards From A Daughter On The Edge
"it passed through my mother from her mother down to me"
At sixteen, Lorde shared her diary with the world, “My mom and dad let me stay home / It drives you crazy getting old.” A decade later and with her latest album, Virgin, she finds herself still grappling with the age at which she got famous, now with the strength to explore her mother’s role in the woman she has become.
When examined through the lens of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, Virgin more than fits the description of the immensely raw and vulnerable work of art that Lorde has insisted on describing it as. “It’s my most personal album yet” is often taken as a red flag, a line so often fed as a PR answer that it’s lost any meaning in the music industry. However, Virgin is one of the few albums that truthfully and brutally fits the bill of that description by completely recontextualizing Lorde’s discography and the twelve years she’s spent in the spotlight thus far. While Pure Heroine was about her teenagehood, “Writer in the Dark” emphasized how much of her mother’s child she is, and Solar Power found her seemingly trying to break free from celebrity, Virgin is an exposing X-ray of Lorde’s sexuality, body, and mother, all told on her own terms and through her own words.
Similarly and I believe non-coincidentally, in 1987, actress Carrie Fisher published Postcards from the Edge, a novel detailing how her relationship with her mother, legendary Hollywood actress Debbie Reynolds, played into her addictions. She went on to write the screenplay for the 1990 film of the same name which had Shirley MacLaine standing in for Reynolds and Meryl Streep playing the role of Fisher. I highly recommend just watching the film and reading the book for yourself because Fisher can obviously put her life into words far better than I could in attempting to summarize them.
I also obviously can’t see into Lorde’s mind and know for sure if it was her intention to approach Virgin with the same mindset Fisher approached Postcards from the Edge just as I don’t know the ins and outs of Lorde’s relationship with her mother. That being said, using what Lorde bravely lays out on this album, I can at least attempt to make sense of it by breaking down my personal interpretation as a fellow mother’s child.
Motherhood takes on various meanings for Lorde throughout Virgin, but “Hammer” seems to be one of the songs where she narrows in specifically on the ideas of rebirth and virginity. “I mighta been born again / I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” she sings after opening the song with “There’s a heat in the pavement / My mercury’s raising / Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation.” Famously, each Lorde album is inspired by a different drug with her drug of choice for Virgin being none other than sex. “Hammer” introduces the drug laced throughout the rest of the album as something newly freeing and exciting for her.
Several of the other tracks, including the succeeding “What Was That” dive deeper into this, but I do think its noteworthy that Lorde’s previous albums were inspired by relationships with older men who met and groomed her teenage self. Virgin is seemingly about breaking free from those manipulated ideas of love she was taught to have growing up. I won’t get deep into speculation because again, I don’t know anything, but I do think the parents of these child stars deserve some criticism for allowing their children to be groomed like this. Virgin is all about realization, and it could be interpreted that one of the realizations she came to when looking back on these relationships could be the role her parents did or didn’t play.
While I was previously convinced “What Was That” should have been both the first single and the album’s opener, the seemingly direct Postcards from the Edge reference at the end of “Hammer” is slowly getting me to change my mind. If it is truly intentional, “It’s a fucked up world, been to hell and back / But I’ve sent you a postcard from the edge” subtly and perfectly sets up the album to be analyzed through the lens of mothers and daughters.
Postcards from the Edge was Fisher’s way of opening up about her complicated relationships with drugs, fame, and mother. Virgin feels like it’s accomplishing something along those same lines with Lorde choosing to focus on her relationships with her body and sexuality in relation to her mother.
I analyzed “What Was That” extensively upon release, but I find it to be even more fascinating within the context of the album. She definitely has multiple subjects she’s addressing this song to, and one of them very well may be her own mother. The “love as drugs” metaphor continues throughout the album as I predicted, but I think the more interesting topic brought to light with this song that permeates the other tracks is the emphasis on waking from a dream and having an epiphany that shifts how she views her past.
“Since I was seventeen, I gave you everything,” she stresses. The age of consent in New Zealand is sixteen, but as someone from California where the age of consent is eighteen, that line raised immediate red flags for me, regardless of whether or not that was her intention. Even then, a 24-year old dated her when she was 16 and a 35-year old dated her when she was 19. Age of consent aside, that’s still very morally wrong of these men. In a 2014 Rolling Stones interview, Lorde’s mother addressed the former relationship: “I didn’t say, ‘Yeah, sure, go date a 24-year-old.’ But her dad and I met James, and we liked him.”
On “Shapeshifter,” Lorde attempts to convince herself that her learned and deeply ingrained perspective on sex and love doesn’t affect her current outlook as an adult free from those unhealthy dynamics, but it’s to no avail.
But the voice in my head says
"Don't let him leave alone"
I become her again (Ah, ah, ah, ah)
Visions of a teenage innocence (Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah)
How'd I shift shape like that?
I haven’t quite cracked how “Man Of The Year” fits into this theory, but if anything, I think it works to properly introduce her relationship to her body within the greater context of the album. In her rebirth, she comes into her body, gender, and sexuality, considering herself a virgin now that she’s seemingly untethered from the weight of her past. However, “Favourite Daughter” questions whether she can ever truly be free of who she was before her rebirth as long as her mother’s DNA runs in her blood.
Ironically, I previously brought up Postcards from the Edge when discussing the generational trauma Charli xcx wrote about on BRAT, but I do believe Virgin seems to be achieving something of that same effect, “Favourite Daughter” naturally being the most direct acknowledgement of this theme.
The first verse shows a loving admiration for her mother’s encouragement, but the chorus presents more sinister undertones to this mother-daughter relationship as she confesses, “Breakin’ my back just to be your favorite daughter” and “Breakin’ my back, just hopin’ you’ll say I’m a star.” Just like xcx sang, “I wanna know where you go when you’re feeling alone” to her mother a year before, Lorde now sings, “And for every door you open / There’s a room I can’t go in / I break in, I still can’t find you.”
She has panic attacks over this pressure, dances until she’s sick, and questions, “Why’d you have to dream so big? Why did no one listen when you hit the notes from your heart?” As someone who grew up in the arts, this is giving textbook stage mom behavior, a mother who didn’t make it in the entertainment industry and now projects that regret by pushing her daughter to make it for her. I didn’t have a stage mom. I had quite the opposite, actually. I’ve always loved the arts more than anything, but my mother always wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer like she dreamed to be before she had kids. That kind of pressure is a lot on a child, and it inevitably reinforces a chain of generational trauma that becomes unbearable to carry the weight of.
Even after all of that reflection and release, Lorde purposely ends the song calling her mother brave. It doesn’t necessarily cancel out any of what she just shared, but it intentionally muddles where she finds herself now. She’s reborn, but she’s also “always runnin’ to ya.” Even after all this rebirth, she remains unconvinced she can stand on her own and can’t help but return to her mother’s arms and validation, for better or for worse.
I'm a good actress, look at the medals I won for ya
So you could imagine being a favorite daughter
“Current Affairs” is another song centered on sex, but even then, Lorde can’t help but cry out for her mother. “My bed is on fire / Mama I’m so scared / Don’t know how to come back / Once I get out on the edge.” “Mama, I’m so scared / Were you ever like this / Once you went out on the edge?” The references to the edge return repeatedly, though with a different connotation than Fisher brings to it and her drug addiction.
Lorde cites the edge as a site of maximum aliveness. Giving the impression that she’s existing in this space for the first time in her life, she returns to the through-line of virginity and its association with purity and youth, turning these two particular concepts on their heads and redefining them in rebirth with the next two songs.
On “Clearblue,” Lorde seeks the complexities of purity, at once setting the scene for “After the ecstasy, testing for pregnancy” while simultaneously using words like “free,” “clearness,” “clean,” and finally asking, “How’s it feel being this alive?” She declares, “I’m nobody’s daughter,” but later in the song, confesses, “There’s broken blood in me, it passed through my mother from her mother down to me.”
To me, these lines are in the same vein as Fisher writing, “Fuck it, I’ll start with me.” Lorde now seems to feel secure enough to redefine what pregnancy and purity look like to her now that she has found herself unchained by generational trauma. Waiting for the test, she briefly considered whether she’ll pass the generational trauma onto her daughter along with her waist and her widow’s peak, but after the pregnancy scare, she can focus on what that moment of raw ecstasy meant to her, what it meant to her to finally feel entirely and vulnerably free.
“GRWM” finds Lorde redefining herself in rebirth. She makes sure not to leave out her “mama’s trauma,” but it’s ultimately her capability to confidently declare herself simply “a grown woman in a baby tee” that matters most. She’s no longer forced to focus on being a singer or an artist or a celebrity or a young girl being told where to go. Fame and recognition may have been what her mother wanted for her, but she comes into her reborn self when she is able to finally recognize what it is that she wants for herself. She can now center her definition and understanding of herself on her body, femininity, and masculinity and everything else can fall away for once. She just wants to be “a grown woman in a baby tee,” and that’s more than okay.
“David” was my immediate favorite on the album, but I’m convinced “Broken Glass” is the hit here. It also happens to be the best discussion and deconstruction of the reality of an eating disorder I’ve seen in any art form.
I don’t think Lorde necessarily intended for the entire album to be viewed from the perspective of a mother-daughter relationship, if at all, but I can say that I’ve been able to apply this song and the catharsis it entails to my own. When my mother visits me, she more often than not feels inclined to comment on my weight, reminding me that I’m too skinny and need to eat more. I know it’s coming from a place of love, but at the same time, it’s hard for me to hear and it’s hard for me to forget that a lot of my insecurities were passed down by her. I skipped lunch in middle school and didn’t realize until just a few years ago how my struggle with my body then was intertwined with my mental health. Everyone in my life either didn’t know I wasn’t eating or was too scared to say anything because I was quick to strike them down.
“I spent my summer getting lost in math / Making weight took all I had” has brought up a lot of difficult emotions for me in the past few days. Recovery is tough. I think the track listing creating such a jarring rollercoaster of emotions and detailing such high highs and low lows in the healing/rebirth process was an intentional choice. While healing my relationship with food and my body has been a long and grueling process, I do think that I’ve been healing generational trauma along the way and realizing that this kind of insecurity and self-hatred can end with me. I think Lorde may have been doing something of the same.
I wanna punch the mirror
To make her see that this won't last
It might be months of bad luck
But what if it's just broken glass?
I’ve seen “If She Could See Me Now” interpreted many different ways, but at its core, it’s a song about Lorde’s reborn self, a version of herself that successfully broke the glass and discovered it really was just broken glass after all. She powerfully declares she’s going back to the clay, but not before asserting, “Hope you find another starlet,” and later clarifying, “It made me a woman, being hurt like that.” She doesn’t express much regret for what’s happened to her, but rather believes all that pain and all those lessons are what have ultimately allowed her to come back stronger in her “virginity.”
I maintain my stance that “David” is the best song here, and it’s even more worthy of that title now that I have a better understanding of the progression of the album. It’s the contemplative counterpart to “If She Could See Me Now,” expressing regret but also reflecting on the words that have spilled out of her mouth and the tears that have been shed in the making of this album and in the relationships that inspired it.
“If I’d had virginity, I would have given that too,” she confesses, calling back to “Since I was seventeen, I gave you everything.” “Why do we run to the ones we do? I don’t belong to anyone,” she cries, seemingly calling back to both “I’m always runnin’ to ya” from “Favourite Daughter” and “I’m nobody’s daughter” from “Clearblue.” She addresses her former lovers, but perhaps even her mother as well when she sings, “I made you God cause it was all that I knew how to do / But I don’t belong to anyone.”
Again, this is all speculation, theory, and analysis. I just find this whole album to be a curious musical and personal progression from “I was in, but I want out / My mother’s love is chokin’ me” all the way back in 2013’s “The Love Club.” She seems to still be grappling with that same struggle all these years later, and fascinatingly, on that song, she advised her future self to “Drop your chin and take yourself back home / And roll out your maps and papers, find out your hiding places again.”
For present day Lorde, one of these maps and papers seems to be a metaphorical blueprint of some kind. In her latest Zane Lowe interview, she seemed to hint at “The Blueprint” being the original title of Virgin and she also referred to her mother as the blueprint of her. An Instagram post of hers from last year was the first mention of “The Blueprint” and was fittingly captioned, “Is teen you proud of future you?”
You know what would also fit the description of maps and papers? Postcards. Exactly. Now, I obviously don’t think Lorde conceived the concept for Virgin twelve years ago and I obviously can’t be 100% sure that she’s ever even seen or read Postcards from the Edge. However, I do think that she intentionally wrote Virgin in conversation with her younger self in an attempt to give a voice to that little girl who gave up her childhood and broke her back for her mother and career. It’s very reminiscent of what Carrie Fisher did with her book and screenplay, whether intentional on Lorde’s end or not.
In a 2011 interview, Carrie Fisher explained of her relationship with her mother, “We had the extra, larger-than-life relationship. This is a very powerful person but in order to have my own identity, I have to forge some kind of character out of nothing.” With Virgin, Lorde seems to be doing the same, attempting to mold out of clay the person she is outside of her mother, lovers, and public persona, and finding peace in the madness as she’s reborn a grown woman.
I still don’t think this is a perfect album or one that comes anywhere near Pure Heroine and Melodrama, but I do think Virgin makes a lot more sense and is a lot more effective when seen as Lorde’s equivalent to a self-titled album. If celebrities are stuck at the age they got famous, this is a public declaration that Lorde has broken free from the ages of sixteen and seventeen and is trying to find her footing as she wakes up from the endless nightmare of camera flashes. She doesn’t have all the answers, but she’s writing anyway, taking it one step at a time and making the mistakes she needs to make in order to grow. Virgin is just as much a postcard to her mother as it is a postcard to her teenage self, that “pure heroine mistaken for featherweight” who deserved a kinder fate than the one she was granted.
We’ve probably got another four years to process this album, so here are some brilliant Virgin reviews and analyses to read while we wait.
There is Such a motherhood throughline in her work, and I never realized it until this essay--great analysis!