With “Selkie Stories are for Losers,” the story is simple enough and a fair parallel of “The Goodman of Wastness”: The wife is a secret selkie, kidnapped and forced to bear children, and then she finds her skin and runs away, leaving her husband and children behind. However, in “The Goodman of Wastness,” the story seems to end right there; the husband searches for but never finds his unwilling wife. “Selkie Stories are for Losers” continues, however; the story is of the selkie’s daughter, forced to work to cover the bills for her father, as her mother ran off long ago. The allusions through “Selkie Stories are for Losers” and the parallel and seemingly abrupt and subtle reference to “The Goodman of Wastness” tell a different story — of daughters who don’t want to be like their mothers and the unending desire of daughters to not be like their mothers.
I once was scrolling mindlessly on Instagram at ten at night (as one does) and came across a page that had compiled a Tumblr Post that starts off with a quote about how the mother raises the eldest daughter to be her, then laments when she becomes her (and after 15 minutes of Google and Instagram, I am sad to say I could not find it) and it spirals from there into a whole group of users sharing the quotes they’d saved personally, with the final poster explaining that these quotes scare them because it’s true. In the context of “Selkie Stories are for Losers,” the narrator could perhaps take a look at this post because it fits her perfectly. Wanting to rebel, to reach for something to hold onto, to not let go of everything once they have what they want, and according to her, are “on the wrong side of magic.” By sharing the different selkie folktales such as “The Goodman of Wastness,” she inherently shares stories of letting go once the goal is met. And while one realizes in the last paragraph what happens — Mona dumps the narrator in Colorado and the narrator burns all her things and screams every night — it’s a story of two daughters and their attempts to set themselves free of their mother’s fate, in which only the narrator succeeds. Mona lets go, but the narrator doesn’t. The allusions to Mona’s fate begin with her mother, who cries a lot. So does Mona, and once they escape, they wish to go back. The narrator is vastly different from her mother, and so this alludes to her fate: stuck in Colorado, having what she wants but also not really.
It is through these two women we look at the scary reality of eldest or only daughters raised to be like their mothers. One goes back, and the other moves on past her memories and past, and onwards to a new future. And those two choices seem to be the only ones. It is up to those daughters to choose their fate and either be a figurative selkie like Mona or a human like the narrator — to become what we most fear becoming as we grow up or to move on past it and become a better person.