All My Mother's Lovers

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When Iris dies in a car crash, Maggie flies home to reckon with a prickly college-age brother, a deflated father nearly catatonic in his grief — with whom Iris always appeared to have a sitcomishly perfect relationship — and the task of interacting with a string of sympathetic strangers, which she finds more than a little annoying. Their relationship was not an intimate one in that stereotypical mother-daughter way but was not totally broken.

Maggie's quest is packed with surprises and wise insights about human relationships, accepting each other, and being queer. Unfolding over the course of nine days, and written with enormous heart, All My Mother’s Lovers is a meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties, grief, and generational divides, as well as a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity. It might happen over years or in a singular moment, but somehow, by God, you’re forced to realize that your parents are people, too. In literature, this position seems to be portrayed as the stereotypical life of many lesbians, so Masad isn't showing anything new or unique along these lines.

When Iris suddenly dies, Maggie grapples with past interactions they both had and tries to understand the woman she learns more and more about. While trying to deal with all of the funeral arrangements, Maggie finds that her mother has left five envelopes to be mailed as her last wishes, but they are addressed to men that Maggie has never heard of. There are many things for which All My Mother’s Lovers should be praised for, not least of which is its cast of dynamic, complicated queer characters whose relationship problems have nothing to do with how they identify. Such is one of the most vital questions brought forth in Ilana Masad’s debut novel, All My Mother’s Lovers: Who are the people that made us, and how do they shape who we become? Unfolding over the course of nine days, and written with enormous heart, All My Mother's Lovers is a meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties, grief, and generational divides, as well as a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity.

Ariel, the brother in his last year or so of college, is on the cusp of being an adult who is fully independent of his parents as opposed to Maggie who is already independent. A tender look at love, relationships, motherhood, and how we oftentimes hurt the people we love most with our silence. There is even a sex scene that takes place in a nursing home, which brings octogenarian sex lives on to the page as well.She’s wasted a lot but you never really feel empathy for her, you must feel like, sheesh, what a jerk. Masad’s impressive novel delves into varieties of that strange magic, love, and of its expansive, life-shaping possibilities. Maggie's need to reduce the act of making love in the opening line of the book to "being eaten out" . All My Mother’s Lovers is engaging, and confident, and often wry, but it unfortunately does not satisfyingly resolve the mysteries we readers want solved.

There is also the unfortunate nature of the novel’s big reveal, which feels far too easy and clean an answer for the complexity of the pages and the characters that come before. Daniel Fraser looks at the most recent translation of Chantal Akerman’s “My Mother Laughs” as a work about motherhood, illness, and language. Masad's work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Paris Review, NPR, BuzzFeed, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as well as many others. All My Mother’s Lovers explores the distance we feel between ourselves and others, even those we love most, and how the gap in those perspectives can be an entry point for grief, empathy, and forgiveness. I’m giving this book two stars instead of one because it’s competently written, but I pretty much hated it.

With a character so woke, it feels oddly surprising when the plot falls into formulaic pits, most notably exemplified in a trip to an omniscient psychic who could easily exist on the Disney Channel.