Guys. You guys. This book.
I don’t even know what to say about it. I read it on my Kindle, which lets me highlight sections; usually I use this feature to highlight things I think are significant, that I can come back to at the end to help me understand the book as a whole. At a certain point while reading this book, I realised I was highlighting on just about every second page. Every sentence, almost, seems weighed down with significance. Yet somehow, the touch of the author is so light, feather-light, so fragile, that it seemed the book might come apart if I breathed wrong.
The book begins with the first-person protagonist, Lucy, in hospital for nine weeks with a mysterious infection. Her husband, caring for their two small children and working full-time, calls Lucy’s mother to come and sit with her. She has not seen, or even spoken to, her mother for many years, but her mother, dirt-poor, who has never travelled before, negotiates a plane and then a New York City taxi to come to her daughter’s bedside. So begins a reflection on the unimaginable complexities of the relationships between parents and children.
This is a short book – it will take you probably 90 minutes to read – that punches far above its weight. Astonishing to me was the volume of nuance it managed to convey through what was not said. The protagonist, who becomes a writer, is told in a writing workshop that she has one story, the story of her father, that will become all the stories she ever writes. Her father barely appears in the novel at all, is physically present in only a few scenes, yet the sense of him and what it was to grow up with him is, by the end of the book, an overwhelming force.
Despite all that highlighting, I don’t really want to write a summary of the themes and structure and prose style. For real, it won’t take that long, and the act of reading this book is such a beautiful, gentle, powerful experience, you should just go do it. Right now. Just go. Everything else can probably wait a couple of hours.