All My Mother's Lovers

Product Information

Masad's work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Paris Review, NPR, BuzzFeed, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as well as many others.

I remember my younger brothers at that age and, like Maggie, I observed them behaving in a way that was fully adult, fully responsible. Yes, each circumstance around the person who received a letter was different, but the pattern kept repeating itself. As she fills in the details of Iris's story, Maggie must confront the possibility that almost everything she knew about her mother -- her marriage, her lukewarm relationship to Judaism, her disapproval of her daughter's queerness -- is more meaningful than she ever allowed herself to imagine. all of the lovers were equally interesting to read about, and they provided an additional sense of suspense and another layer to uncover. Maggie tells the reader that Lucia is Puerto Rican and Black, that she has had stress and anxiety since Trump's election, and that she was so affected by the Charlottesville tragedy that she had to sleep at her own house rather than Maggie's apartment that night.

Maggie and Lucia felt like the author was ticking off the boxes of what queer life looks like for the 25-35 set in the Trump years. i found the themes shallow and unsatisfactory— the author wants to talk about race, gender, politics, and sexuality but the way it's done here grated me. Now in her late twenties, Maggie is finally in something resembling a serious relationship, wondering if some of whatever shaped her parents’ decades-long love story might exist after all. i definitely recommend this, it’s a little bit slow but definitely worth it and does an interesting depiction of life and love.

And she affectingly plumbs the mind-bending hugeness that is losing a parent: Oh, how formidable mothers, she suggests, tend to loom even larger in death. The ensuing road trip takes her over miles of California highways, through strangers' recollections of a second, hidden life (that seems almost impossible to reconcile with the Iris she knew), and a journey through her own fears as she navigates her new relationship. After Maggie Krause’s mother dies suddenly in a car crash, Maggie finds five sealed envelopes with her will, each addressed to a mysterious man she’s never heard of. writing reviews is all fun and games until i come across a book that i have absolutely no idea how to review.Unfolding over the course of nine days, and written with enormous heart, All My Mother's Lovers is a meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties, grief, and generational divides, as well as a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity. i feel like i could read endlessly just to be able to learn more about them and discover even more depths. This book overwhelmingly provided value to me as a reading/listening experience and I can't wait for Ms. There’s something in the journey here that made me want to keep turning the pages - I also wanted to know about Maggie’s mother’s lovers. Along the way, she discovers a side of her mother she never knew existed, secrets she (and in some instances, Maggie’s father) kept, and she starts to understand things her mother did and said which never had context before.

My complaint about it is that it tried a little too hard to be all-encompassingly diverse, to the point where it was distracting. Thank you to Edelweiss, Dutton Books and Ilana Masad for the opportunity to read this and provide an honest review. Masad’s novel oscillates back and forth between Maggie’s and Iris’s perspectives, jumping through five decades of Iris’s life and the 10 or so days in Maggie’s after Iris’s death. there is so much depth and so many layers to these characters, and that’s what keeps the story going. All My Mother’s Lovers explores the distance we feel between ourselves and others, even those we love most, and how the gap in those perspectives can be an entry point for grief, empathy, and forgiveness.

Daniel Fraser looks at the most recent translation of Chantal Akerman’s “My Mother Laughs” as a work about motherhood, illness, and language. It tells the story of Maggie, who uncovers a series of stories about her mother, who has recently died, that will shake both her understanding of her mother but also herself. There are many things for which All My Mother’s Lovers should be praised for, not least of which is its cast of dynamic, complicated queer characters whose relationship problems have nothing to do with how they identify.