ALL MY MOTHER'S LOVERS

A debut novelist explores the complexities of love and grief.

Maggie Krause is in bed with her girlfriend when she gets the call: Her mother has just died in a car accident. When she returns to her childhood home, she finds her younger brother angry and her father paralyzed by grief. The discovery of a cache of letters that her mother, Iris, wanted delivered to five different men gives Maggie something to do besides coping with her family’s loss or processing her own feelings: She decides that she will find the strangers to whom these letters are addressed. This road trip is a journey of discovery for Maggie. She learns that her parents’ seemingly idyllic union was not quite what she thought it was; the affairs to which the book’s title refers are extramarital. As she gets to know the men her mother loved, Maggie also gets to know her mother better. And, of course, she begins to better understand herself. This setup is interesting, but the storytelling veers from the slow and slightly superficial to the…kind of kitschy. A scene with an all-seeing psychic is particularly hard to take seriously, and the whole narrative hinges on a big reveal that feels melodramatic and a bit cheap. Masad has chosen to surprise readers instead of providing them with information they need to understand Iris even though there are chapters narrated from her perspective. Getting glimpses of her trysts feels more voyeuristic than revealing. And the one letter we get to read seems macabre and manipulative—gaslighting from beyond the grave. Where the book succeeds is in depicting queer characters as multifaceted human beings who are not defined solely by their sexuality or gender. Maggie’s relationship problems aren’t because she’s a lesbian; they’re because she’s afraid of commitment. And it’s not often that fiction writers—or anyone, for that matter—depict women of middle age and beyond as beings who desire and wish to be desired.

An intriguing but uneven debut.