UNBROKEN BONDS

In Hogan’s debut novel, a pregnant teenager’s life is irrevocably changed when she’s sent to a home and school for unwed mothers in conservative 1950s Tennessee.

After 17-year-old Joanna Wilson becomes pregnant, she quickly finds herself in in a Southern gothic nightmare. She suffers physical abuse at the hands of her father, and her married lover, Jack Wyatt, who’s still devoted to his injured wife, sends her off to the Frances Weston Home in Knoxville. It’s a place for young unmarried women to give birth, away from the prying eyes of judgmental Tennessee society; for the women sequestered there, it’s both a schoolhouse and a jail, where the wardens are stoic, “crowlike” nuns. This prisonlike setting, where everything beyond the house’s gardens is off-limits, is fertile ground for Hogan to explore the culture and misogyny of a classist, racist 1950s and ’60s America. The real horror of the home for unwed mothers, however, is not simply its restrictiveness, but what happens to the babies; they’re put up for adoption, no matter what their mothers’ wishes are, and the women never know exactly what becomes of their children. As time passes, the novel follows Joanna and others from the home as they enter adulthood, exploring how they grapple with the trauma of separation. Over the course of the novel, Hogan’s prose is pared down but deliberate, reflecting the staid resilience of her central characters. The narrative, while alarming, is very much grounded in the reality of the time and place in which it’s set. It’s clear that many women in similar situations never received answers about what happened to their children, but in this novel, Hogan does offer a hint of relief. Overall, it’s a narrative that builds slowly, hovering on a photograph as a missing piece in a puzzle, and coalescing in a resounding defense of women’s reproductive autonomy.

An elegantly written and damning narrative.