In most films,” Emily Gould writes in Vanity Fair, “a child’s bath time symbolizes tender innocence and womblike safety.” But the most memorable recent scene of bath time portrayed on screen, from Mare of Easttown, involves a young mother recovering from an opiate addiction passing out from exhaustion while her young boy nearly drowns. (She later relapses and loses her hope of regaining custody over him.) The myth that motherhood “will give something without taking something irreparable and valuable away” is “so deeply woven into our culture,” laments Adrian Horton in the Guardian—but who exactly believes today that motherhood does not exact costs? Who ever has? Already in Genesis—no more than three chapters in—we see God cursing Eve: “In pain you shall bring forth children.” To Gyllenhaal, the story of The Lost Daughter exposes the entrenched myth of the “natural mother.” But we need merely to switch from Netflix to HBO to find, in the penultimate episode of the third season of the TV show Succession, Caroline, ex-wife of the grand patriarch Logan Roy and mother to the three contenders to his throne, telling her own daughter: “Truth is, I probably should never have had children. … Some people just aren’t made to be mothers.” Mama, what are you doing, why haven’t you called? Won’t you at least let us know if you’re alive or dead?” It is hard to tell whether the film’s version of Leda, under Gyllenhaal’s direction, is as fortunate. For most of the film, she seems to embody, still, not much more than “a confused tangle of desires and great arrogance.” And the flattening of the character seems to be more than an accidental omission: Gyllenhaal cut from the final version of the film the only reference in her original screenplay to Leda’s ambivalence (“It felt like a lot of things,” Leda says, after Nina reminds her that she called leaving home “amazing”).

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Among the things Ferrante told the interviewer she’d missed from the original, she included, alongside her emphasis on the happy moments Leda shares with her daughters, “the curt sentence that ends my story.”

In the novel, by contrast, Leda’s leaving her daughters is not an act of unambiguous liberation. It is, among other things, a mistake—a human one, but a mistake nonetheless—that the protagonist is relieved to have recognized as early as she did. In the book, Nina’s questioning performs an important function for Leda, too. Nina asks the very questions that Leda’s own daughters, in their pain, could never pose: Why did you leave? Why did you return? In response, Leda is finally able to speak truthfully of her past, not simply to warn Nina (“It doesn’t pass, none of this passes!” Gyllenhaal’s Leda proclaims to Nina moments before she gets stabbed), but in an attempt to convey an irresolvable, intrinsic ambivalence. What was hardest for the young Leda in the novel was not keeping all her pent-up energies—sexual, intellectual, creative, destructive—under control but the weight of her tremendous, terrible love for her girls: “I loved them too much and it seemed to me that love for them would keep me from becoming myself.” The figure Leda reaches for to express what it was like to leave them is not of an orgasmic explosion but of disintegration: “It was as if my whole self had crumbled, and the pieces were falling freely in all directions with a sense of contentment.” The self breaks up, scatters. She tells Nina, “I was too taken by my own life” to feel “sad,” but she felt a persistent “weight right here, as if I had a stomachache,” and her “heart skipped a beat whenever I heard a child call Mama.” Because I realized that I wasn’t capable of creating anything of my own that could truly equal them.” In a recent interview, Elena Ferrante was asked what she thought of the latest adaptation of one of her novels, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter. “I generally avoid praising a film on the basis of its fidelity to the book,” she replied with diffidence. “A good novel is elusive; as a film-maker you don’t ever really possess it, you only get an idea of it and you work on that idea.” As for Gyllenhaal’s film, it has, she said, “the faithfulness of betrayal.”

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Overcoming this taboo about the reality of mother and son incest is not easy for either victim or therapist. But as therapists, we must examine our own reluctance and courageously wade into this unconscious quagmire if we’re going to help our male victims of sexual abuse. Contributing to this sort of blindness, when a mother sexually abuses her son it’s most often covert. She’s subtle and does it in such “loving” ways that even the son is left with questions as to whether abuse really happened. When Stuart was in his 20s, he once told his mother that she should cover up and not wear clothes that exposed so much cleavage. She became angry, said that was “his problem,” not hers, and gave him the cold shoulder for the rest of the day. Gyllenhaal’s Leda does not know of such reasons and, in an exact reversal, declares herself very much alive. Her daughters call her as she wakes up on the shore, still bleeding from the puncture wound:Fans of books that have been adapted into films have much to learn from Ferrante’s counsel. Loving a book can make it hard for a reader to appreciate the film based on it; worse, it can make them into pedantic killjoys: “Hamlet is not 45 years old!” While of parochial interest to fans of the book, from the perspective of the film, the question of whether it “captures” the letter or spirit of the original is irrelevant. A screenwriter and director are free to draw as much or as little from the source material as they wish—a filmmaker works only on “an idea” of the book, as Ferrante says—and the final product ought to be judged as the work of art that it is, not as an attempt at cinematic facsimile of the original. For its courage to portray such an apparently unsympathetic mother tenderly, without condemnation or judgment, the film has received much critical acclaim, some deserved. “Leda is often rude and unkind,” Lydia Kiesling wrote for the New York Times Magazine, but the performances “allow the viewer to inhabit her desperation, rendering judgment irrelevant.” The combined result is a rare, truly realistic representation of motherhood through the ages: “a crafty treatise on maternal ambivalence” (the Washington Post), “an astute portrait of the painful expectations of womanhood” ( Paste). Over time, however, Stuart was able to admit that his mother was sexual with him. He made several attempts to talk with his mother, but she never admitted to anything, replying that she “couldn’t remember,” and that he was exaggerating much of what he recalled.