You’re warding off trouble before it ever starts.
Maggie, like many lesbians, learns to live a little more aggressively as a form of self-defense. Maggie’s not an easy person to get close to: she’s impulsive, rowdy, closed off, and sometimes deliberately shocking. Maybe, Masad suggests, it is because we don’t know how to be vulnerable.
How, Masad asks, can we be so close to each other and yet still so far away? What started as a way to honor her mother’s wishes becomes a painful exploration of Iris’s secret second life. The truth-that Iris was having successive affairs-proves profoundly destabilizing for Maggie. Maggie’s perception of her own history is flawed, and she becomes increasingly aware that she is clinging to old narratives. The past can be reshaped, Masad demonstrates, and our understanding of it changes through experience and discovery. Masad cleverly manipulates the gap between what Maggie misunderstands and what the reader, through Iris, learns. Between the sections focused on Maggie meeting each of the lovers, Masad intercuts chapters from the perspective of Iris at various moments in the past. The men she meets are, as the title suggests, the ex-lovers of Maggie’s mother, Iris. Maggie’s journey, as psychological as it is geographical, takes her across California and out to Las Vegas. In the novel, she explores how little we know those closest to us, how memories and narratives about the past are malleable, and how women, especially gay women, must learn to be vulnerable. A young queer writer, Masad is better known for her short stories, personal essays, and incisive book reviews. Forced to go through her mother’s effects, Maggie discovers five hand-written letters to five different men-ones Maggie has never heard of-and, running from her grief, decides to deliver the letters herself.Īuthor Ilana Masad brings Maggie’s situation to life in her compelling debut novel All My Mother’s Lovers. There, she finds her emotionally catatonic father and bitter younger brother unable to deal with the urgent practicalities of death. Her mother has just died in a car crash, her brother says, and would she please come home? Refusing to fall apart, Maggie kisses her girlfriend, Lucia, goodbye and flies back to California. In the middle of the night, twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause receives the kind of phone call we all dread.
All My Mother’s Lovers Explores how Grief Transforms Us
0 kommentar(er)
