Claire Oshetsky

Maybe the only thing more surprising than the premise of Claire Oshetsky’s new novel, said Thaisa Frank in the San Francisco Chronicle, is that the project began as a memoir. Chouette, Oshetsky’s debut, relates a fable-like story of a woman who gives birth to an owl and loves the bird despite its foreign way of thinking and behaving. Oshetsky had previously tried writing more directly about raising an autistic daughter but dropped the effort when she decided she was appropriating her daughter’s story. The breakthrough came when a strange opening line popped into Oshetsky’s head: “I dream I’m making tender love to an owl.” The rest of the tale flowed from there. “Once I wrapped this story in a fictional wrapper,” the former journalist says, “I felt free to tell my own truth.”

Oshetsky’s daughter, now 21, helped her mother by sharing sometimes painful memories from childhood, said Danielle Kurtzleben in NPR.org. Adults, including teachers and therapists, often had trouble understanding her. “She was like an owl,” Oshetsky says. “I think of owls as very independent. They don’t care if you don’t like it when they cough up owl pellets. And they just go on their way of being who they are.” In Chouette, the owl daughter also kills and eats small pets, worrying the narrator’s husband more than it worries the narrator. That split, Oshetsky says, was merely a fictional device. “The father and the mother aren’t two people,” she says. “The father in the story is me on the days when I frantically searched for the right intervention, the right therapy. The mother in the story is me on the days when I was sure my child was perfect the way she was.”