“For One’s Own Benefit”

“For One’s Own Benefit” names a question that unsettles Sofia Papastergiadis’s inherited account of family love: whether acting for oneself is necessarily selfish, or whether self-denial can become a debt imposed on others. The idea first appears as Sofia’s judgment of Christos Papastergiadis, whose choices have materially benefited him while leaving Rose Papastergiadis and Sofia to bear their consequences. It then turns back on Sofia, challenging her to distinguish care from obligation and sacrifice from a life indefinitely organized around someone else’s needs.

The Language of Interest and Care

The motif takes shape in the family’s unequal arrangement of money, labor, and dependence. After Christos’s religious conversion, he marries a much younger woman, inherits a fortune from his grandfather’s shipping business in Athens, and has another child. Sofia understands his new wealth and family as advantages he has secured for himself, while he has not shared even a euro of his inheritance with his first family. She describes herself as her mother’s burden and creditor: Rose provides support, and Sofia repays her with her legs, constantly running around to care for her. The metaphor makes affection inseparable from accounting. Care is real, but Sofia experiences it as a balance she can never settle.

That imbalance has practical consequences. To finance treatment at the Gómez Clinic, Rose and Sofia apply together for a loan secured against their London property. The bank is inclined to approve it because Rose has paid off the mortgage, and the house’s value makes further borrowing possible. Sofia loses paid work to attend the bank interview; Rose returns home to make another list of symptoms, while Sofia goes back to making espressos. Medical care, household labor, and Sofia’s income are therefore entangled. The loan may enable Rose’s treatment, but the cost is carried through the property and the daughter’s time as well as through Rose’s own body.

The idea is also shadowed by the way others name their relationship. At the clinic, Dr Gómez asks Rose whether he may call her by her first name. Rose agrees, explaining that Sofia already does so and that it is her name. Dr Gómez then asks Sofia whether she calls her mother Rose, a question she has recently heard before. This exchange does not define what either woman owes the other, but it makes their family roles less automatic: Rose can be a mother and a person addressed by her chosen name. Elsewhere, Dr Gómez identifies Rose’s concern for Sofia’s safety, even as Rose describes her daughter as idle and dependent. Care can protect, criticize, and constrain at once; the language of benefit does not settle which of those effects should count most.

Alexandra’s Question

In Athens, Alexandra gives Sofia’s habitual verdict on Christos a deceptively simple reply. When Sofia says that her father only does things to his advantage, Alexandra asks why anyone would do otherwise. Her question shifts the issue from a charge against one man to an assumption Sofia has treated as self-evident. If pursuing one’s own interest is ordinary, then Christos’s conduct may be legible without being excused; more unsettlingly, Sofia must ask whether she herself is permitted to want anything for her own sake.

The challenge lands amid a sharp contrast between the women’s lives. Alexandra has a career, a devoted husband, a child, and a home in an affluent neighbourhood. Sofia, by contrast, has no home of her own: during the week she sleeps in the Coffee House storeroom and on weekends at Rose’s. She is also living with an unfinished doctorate and the duties of caring for her sick mother. As Alexandra’s baby feeds, Alexandra adjusts her position and briefly separates the child from her breast when feeding hurts. The scene complicates any simple opposition between self-interest and love: Alexandra remains attentive to her daughter while also responding to her own discomfort.

Sofia tests that complication against her mother’s history. She imagines Rose choosing a different life when Sofia was five: leaving for Hong Kong to find work and better prospects, while Sofia lived with her grandmother in Yorkshire. This is a counterfactual, not an event Rose actually undertook. Its force lies in the alternative it makes visible. Sofia recognizes that Rose has done things against her own advantage, and that she feels chained to this sacrifice, mortified by it. Her imagined abandonment is painful, but it also reveals how thoroughly she has taken maternal self-denial as the structure of her own life.

The Cost of a Family Story

Sofia does not simply replace her accusation against Christos with a new certainty. She says that her father is not the major plot of her life, yet immediately sees him mapped in the cosmology of her screensaver, shattered but functioning. She has no plan to replace him. Her mother’s blue eyes appear amid the wreckage, and Sofia understands both the force of Rose’s sacrifice and the resentment it produces in her. The contradiction matters: Rose’s choices may have been generous, but generosity can bind the person who receives it to an obligation that was never explicitly negotiated.

The family’s different accounts of advantage also surface through language. Rose taught Sofia Greek when she was young, though the language was rarely spoken at home, probably as a way of punishing Christos. Years later, at a review meeting, Rose speaks Greek to make a joke about a Yorkshire stereotype, ending in English by denying that she owns a whippet. The joke briefly creates a complicity between mother and daughter. It does not resolve their conflict, and Rose’s interruption diverts the meeting from Sofia’s account, but it shows that their bond includes shared language and pleasure as well as care and resentment. Neither can be reduced to a single calculation of who has sacrificed more.

A Small Act of Release

The clearest change in Sofia’s understanding comes during her visit to Christos in Athens. On the night before she leaves, he offers her what he calls spending money, although he has not done so since she was fourteen. After searching his wallet, he gives her a single ten-euro note. Sofia later puts that money into the cup of a woman begging at her table. The woman speaks Greek, limps toward Sofia, and kisses her hand; Sofia recognizes this as the first affection anyone has shown her in Athens.

The gesture does not undo Christos’s failure to support his first family, nor does it transform the ten euros into meaningful restitution. Its importance is in the direction Sofia gives the money. She receives it from a father whose self-interest has shaped her understanding of family, then passes it on to someone in need. The act is small and specific, but it interrupts the idea that every exchange must reproduce the original debt. Sofia’s realization that Christos would act to her disadvantage whenever doing otherwise would disadvantage him is painful; she also experiences the recognition as freeing. Seeing the pattern plainly loosens, rather than repairs, its hold on her.

From Recognition to Choice

The motif returns at the novel’s close in a conversation about driving. After Rose warns Sofia against driving without a licence, Sofia answers that Rose is herself a driver, is head of her household, and needs to begin doing things to her own advantage. Rose says she will try, while imagining Sofia finishing her doctorate in America. The exchange gives the concept a new direction: Sofia is no longer only judging Christos’s choices or measuring the cost of Rose’s sacrifices. She is asking her mother to claim an interest of her own, and Rose answers with a hope that also recognizes Sofia’s future beyond the household.

The ending does not announce that either woman has escaped dependence. Rose’s promise is tentative, and Sofia’s imagined doctoral future is not presented as already secured. Instead, the repeated language marks a change in what can be said between them. Acting for one’s own benefit has moved from Sofia’s indictment of her father, through Alexandra’s challenge and Sofia’s recognition of maternal sacrifice, toward a difficult possibility shared with Rose. The concept holds together self-interest and care without making them opposites: the question is not whether love demands self-erasure, but whether a family can make room for choices that do not treat one person’s life as payment for another’s.