WHAT TO KEEP

A smart, ruefully funny debut chronicles actress-turned-playwright Denny Roman’s coming of age.

Okay, so she’s 37 in 2000 and tentatively moving into adulthood just as her first full-length play opens successfully off-Broadway. But Denny had a lot of childhood grievances to get over, starting with her parents’ divorce when she was ten and the fact that her mother Lily, though loving, is so wrapped up in her medical research that she tends to miss things like Denny’s understudy-becomes-star turn as Lola in her suburban Ohio high-school production of Damn Yankees. Luckily, even as early as that event back in 1976, Denny has found a second mother: “Maureen is the one who shows up, whether or not Denny’s parents do, and Maureen is the one who taught her not to listen to the idiotic voices in her head, just the smart ones.” Beginning as the invaluable organizer of Lily’s and Denny’s lives, Maureen later becomes a psychotherapist, has a mixed-race baby out of wedlock at age 45, and dies on Denny when she’s in her 50s. She’s as complicated and appealingly vulnerable as the other members of the extended family that Cline portrays so well: Lily’s nurturing younger second husband Phil; Denny’s often clueless father Charles and his second wife Ellen; and Maureen’s son Luke. Most engaging of all, though, are Lily herself—so anxious to do her best for her daughter that she almost always blows it—and Denny, whose “emotional immediacy,” she realizes early, tends either to confound or overwhelm other people, including ones she loves. The author nicely manages to capture the tangled resentments and aggravations of family life without herself wallowing in them, and she depicts her characters’ feelings with both humor and a sense of empathy in clean, cool prose spiked with just enough colloquial bite.

No Big Insights here: just perfectly observed details of ordinary life that coalesce to offer a realistically hopeful and genuinely touching finale.