A juice box of suburban satire
is a path to madness.
To a large extent, Lady’s candour inoculates her from our disdain. Despite the novel’s persistent humour, Lepucki captures the cocktail of love, desperation and guilt that can sometimes poison parents of children with special needs. This is, among many things, a story about the ways we imagine we hurt our children and the ways we imagine they hurt us. The whole time Lady is procrastinating on the composition of her memoir – “my horrible book” – she’s revealing to us the complicated details of her life that her agent wants her to trim away.
Lepucki, an editor and writer for the online magazine the Millions, desecrates so much sacred ground here that you half expect hell-hounds to jump out and tear her to shreds. She creates an uncommonly candid portrait of frustrated motherhood, even while de-constructing the art of memoir with all its contradictory potential to reveal and disguise.
That theme gets re-framed in fascinating ways by the novel’s related exploration of portraiture.
Years earlier, Lady posed for her sister-in-law for a now famous series of photos. She’s both embarrassed and proud of her sexy appearance in a picture known as Woman No. 17, and the novel’s consideration of that image offers an unsettling reflection on parenting, the world’s most image-conscious role.
Beneath the slick surface of Lady’s sardonic banter, it’s clear that she isn’t a bad mother – or she isn’t just a bad mother – she’s a woman who desperately loves her sons, but feels agonisingly inadequate.
Lepucki complicates Lady’s anxiety deliciously by introducing a second, alternating narrator with her own very different mother issues. Esther, an art student who was never quite avant-garde enough for her fellow art students, answers Lady’s ad for a nanny and announces that she’d like to be called “S.”
She quickly bonds with little Devin, and it’s pretty clear there will eventually be some late-night bonding with silent Seth. But what she doesn’t disclose is that she’s in the process of creating a bizarre art project: a performance piece that involves re-enacting her own alcoholic mother’s life, bottle by bottle.
Her secret maternal imitation makes a striking contrast to Lady’s life, which has been one long effort to avoid resembling her own mother. But there’s nothing schematic or predictable about the host of mother problems slinking around these pages.
Although none of these characters knows the whole story, every one of them – even 2-yearold Devin – knows something illicit that the others don’t. The disclosures that Lepucki engineers in this smart novel are sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious, always irresistible. – The Washington Post