LISA TADDEO on Fever Dream
The first time I got drunk after becoming a mother culminated with one of the worst hangovers of my life. My daughter was just about two. It was the first time we’d gotten a babysitter, and the occasion was my birthday. My husband made the impossible-to-get reservation at the hot new sushi spot. I was stratospherically impressed and excited. We ate copious amounts of sea urchin, and I drank my weakness, hot saké, like it was life-giving green tea.
The next morning was full of sun and my daughter was thrilled to be alive. I asked my husband for one more present. Please take our child away from me so she won’t see her mother like this, like the college girl she once was, bent over the toilet.
He took our daughter to the park, and I did something I hadn’t had the luxury of doing during the day in such a long time – I read an entire book. The book was called Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin and it scared the living shit out of me, I think, in precisely the way I needed.
Fever Dream is about environmental disaster and motherhood linking hands in a ghastly but gorgeous way. It is about earthhood. It is a beautiful, singular, slim beast of a novel and I can say a million things about it but I don’t want to ruin it for the reader. The thing I will say, the thing that stuck with me, was the way the novel dealt with a desire I’d craved my whole life and had only grown exponentially since I’d become a mother – the superpower to be able to prevent a terrible thing from happening.
In the novel’s original language of Spanish, the title more closely translates to ‘rescue distance’. The mother, Amanda, is always trying to calculate the amount of distance that may exist between her and her daughter, Nina, wherein she still has enough time to get to her if something bad happens.
Since my daughter had been born, I’d been trying to calculate the rescue distance every day of our lives but didn’t have the words for it. But now I understand in a way that I hadn’t before what my role was and how different my role was from what I thought it should be. It is a book that feels hopeless and yet provides hope. AKA:
This can happen but it has not happened yet.
It is a book that provides life experience like a primer. Like all sad things that are also beautiful, it is also full of hope.
The same hope I had that morning when I swore I would never wake up a hungover mother again. At least not on hot saké, that’s for sure.