This is one of those “modern classics” type books. The ones you often see at used bookstores and sales because everyone seems to have bought a copy to read or have on their shelves, but over the years slowly got rid of as they collected dust (whether or not they were ever read). I have a whole list of these novels in my mind, the books I often see resold because people felt like they should or had to read it, but didn’t connect to it or get into it the way critics and others said they should. Or the books people bought because they were popular and did read and like, but not enough to keep forever and couldn’t pass on to a friend because it seemed like everyone already had a copy. (Does anyone else know what I’m talking about here or is it just me?) Anyways, the long and short of that intro is that I’ve seen and heard a lot about this novel, and its adaptation into a movie and Oprah’s choosing it as one of her book club titles, etc., but never felt a major inclination to pick it up. I know myself and my mood reader preferences and this one just never seemed to be the book that fit my mood. So that made me not totally upset about it being chosen as my long-distance book club pick for this month, because that was the kick I needed to finally pick it up and see what the fuss was about for myself.

“
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”

This is Astrid’s story. Sometime around when she was 12 years old, her mother, Ingrid, went to jail for murder and Astrid entered the Los Angeles foster system. For the next six years, Astrid skips from home to home, facing a steady onslaught of new rules, traumas, lessons, being taken advantage of, struggling to grow-up and become who she will be…all while dealing with the toxic relationship that has developed between herself and her mother that follows her wherever she ends up. And yet, when she turns 18 and her freedom is finally within her grasp, along with a chance to finally get what she needs from her mother (if at a price), Astrid and Ingrid are able to find just enough redemption with each other.

“Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”

To be straight up from the beginning, I listened to the audiobook (narrated by Oprah herself) and was about halfway through when I realized it was abridged. I have never read an abridged version of a book before, that I know of. Anyways, I was too far invested (and too close to the book club deadline and also unable to get the book from the library because of coronavirus) to change course. So bear that in mind through this review, though, in general, I don’t think it will change too much honestly. The narration was wonderful. And the power and beauty of Fitch’s writing came through, even in short(er) form. I do think that overall, plot-wise, it where I missed the most. And I guess “plot” is a strong word for the events unfolding in this novel either way. It’s definitely more of a character development focused piece. And to that end, I felt very invested and involved in Astrid and Ingrid and their play with/off each other. But I think the biggest “hole” I had in my experience was how well I got to know the “side” characters. I got full and vibrant pictures of each of Astrid’s foster homes and families, but I never felt like I deeply connected with any of them. That, and the fact that I didn’t completely track how long Astrid spent in each place (and therefore, was not always sure of how old she was in any given part, other than “older than before,”) I choose to believe, were due to the abridgement.

“I had to face this, that people left, and you didn’t see them again.”

That quote basically, in my opinion, could have been a tagline or sub-title for this entire novel. Astrid’s life is a series of relationships that connections that disappear. With the exception of her mother and one foster-home friend, Paul, the people in Astrid’s life leave one after another. All for different reasons that truly have nothing to do with her (her foster experiences really are one trauma after another – TW for sexual abuse/sex with a minor, gun-violence and suicide). And yet Astrid is left to deal with each on her own, without a constant touchpoint other than a mother in jail who is emotionally manipulative and really not a paragon of mental health or parenting in any way. And Fitch’s words do a powerful job portraying each of these interactions and relationships. She has such a poetry to her writing. It is artistic and lovely, for all the pain it carries with it. A literary juxtaposition that worked so well.

“But then I realized, they weren't calling out for their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers, purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what's in in for me? Not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.
They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled...mother's big enough, wide enough for us to hide in...mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.”

The meat of this novel, the focal piece, is, of course, the mother-daughter relationships. Of course, for the majority of the book, disregarding some moments at the beginning and the end, the main mother -daughter pair, Ingrid and Astrid, is quite poisonous. The manipulation and mind games and “hard truths” that Ingrid throws at her daughter are heart-breaking to read. And Astrid experiences a number of other examples of motherhood in her foster homes, all flawed in greater or lesser ways, all working “in her best interests” in ways that definitely don’t always seem that way. Even the best foster situation she was in (and by that I mean, healthiest, regarding what Astrid got out of it), was with a mother/family who “needed” a daughter for reasons with ulterior motives. But the good moments there were full of warmth and poignancy that showed glimpses of what a good mother-daughter bond could be. Still, it was maybe real and maybe only felt that way in comparison – the unknowing there is “kudos” to the author for creating such an uncertainty. In summary, many dysfunctional types of motherhood were presented in this novel, and yet in each instance, Astrid never gave up the hope for something better, the connection(s) she deserved to have. That hope was present throughout, alongside the ache, leaving her open to the small redemption Ingrid gets a chance for at the end. Which was almost as hard to read as all the traumatic experiences because as a reader, I didn’t know if she deserved it (maybe didn’t want her to have it), but I get that for Astrid to move on and be able to live, for herself, she needed to give it. Astrid needed, and deserved, to have a mother, however flawed or ill, at least in part the way that she had wanted/imagined.

“No matter how much she had damaged me or how flawed she was, how violently mistaken, my mother loved me. Unquestionably.”

This was a dark and disturbing (topically), but beautiful, so beautiful (in language) novel. I see why Oprah picked it, I see why it was made into a movie and got popular, but I can also see why is languishes on shelves (at least in my imagination). And I think even if I read a physical copy, or listened to a non-abridged version, I would have felt the same. It’s not a style that will appeal to everyone and, for me, is not something am always into. I respect it, but I am not sure that it was totally for me. (Also, and this may just be a situation of bad timing, I just finished T Kira Madden’s memoir, which focused a lot on complex and not-always-pretty parental relationships and I loved it. Like, it’s a new all-time favorite for me. And perhaps the similar themes in this book made me compare the two in my head more than I would have if I hadn’t read them so close to each other…or, perhaps, like I said, this novel just wasn’t for me.) Long story short, I liked this novel. I thought it was poetic and rough in balancing measure. And I can see why so many think it’s great. But it didn’t speak to me personally.