Witty woman stumbles into trope
“I did not want to have a job,” the protagonist of “Green Dot” declares.
Hera Stephen, the 20-something narrator of Madeleine Gray’s debut, is a newly hired community moderator at a Sydney newspaper, a job to which she brings multiple arts degrees and acidic wit.
Forced to make internal calculations, such as “Coffee: good. Money: none,” she reluctantly accepts her post. Hera’s thoughts on labor — specifically, the plastic quality of workplace communication — are biting and funny. Gray commands the same authority when she conveys Hera’s deep affection for her father; the warmth of their banter is a great comfort on the page. And Hera’s chemistry with Arthur Jones, the married colleague with whom she has an affair, develops swiftly and convincingly, each exchange between them filled with longing.
Hera is quick to stave off predictable responses — from loyal friends Soph and Sarah, as well as from the reader — by acknowledging her folly.
“For not one moment of this relationship was I unaware of what every single popular culture representation of such an arrangement portended my fate to be,” she says.
Perceptive and hilarious, Hera charges ahead, fully aware of the trope into which she has stumbled.
When Hera decides to leave Sydney for the UK, she hopes her absence will encourage Arthur to leave his wife, Kate. She explains that “it is only barely possible to live in a new city when the person you love is still online” with “his little green dot staring at you like an eye you can’t see yourself reflected in.”
By the time she returns to Sydney, circumstances are even more complicated, not only by the pandemic but also by Kate’s pregnancy. Hera imposes a deadline — Arthur must confess to his wife by the end of the year.
As the deadline nears and Hera commits increasingly risky transgressions, her fate remains unpredictable and thrillingly full of possibilities, however unlikely most of them are.
— Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Minneapolis Star Tribune
When her mother Jane, a healthy 75-year-old,
shockingly decides to take her own life, Susannah Kennedy is left reeling with innumerable questions. There are also 45 years’ worth of diaries that contain some answers and ultimately reveal some surprising secrets.
This elegantly written memoir by Kennedy, a former newspaper reporter-turned-anthropologist, opens a window into the complicated relationships that can exist between mothers and daughters, especially when the mother is a narcissistic single parent.
Jane is a charismatic woman who had a successful post-divorce career teaching in the inner city. She is widely liked and admired but has a fraught relationship with her daughter, Susannah, especially after the girl reaches puberty and becomes a rival for male attention.
Kennedy never knows for sure if her mother intended for her to read the journals, to be Jane’s confessor or interpreter. But they were all there, stuffed into a chest in her mother’s San Francisco apartment after the suicide.
So after returning to the U.S. in the wake of her mother’s death with her German husband and three children, Kennedy reads all of the volumes over a year. She learns more about her late father, a violent alcoholic who often beat her mother.
Kennedy also learns more about her mother’s younger disabled sister, Helen, who died at age 4, shaping forever Jane’s feelings about life and dying. And there are stunning revelations about the death of Jane’s mother, who had been undergoing radiation for lymphoma.
Reading Jane’s diaries brings Kennedy closer to her mother, more sympathetic to her circumstances so many years before and more cognizant that our parents will always be with us. We don’t ever “get over” them, she learns. We absorb them and move on.