Dementia is a land where my mother lives. It is not who she is. I think of it as an actual place, like the Acropolis or Yonkers. A place where beloved and ancient queens and kings retire, where linear time doesn’t exist and the rules of society are laid aside. Whenever I go to my parents’ double-wide in Hayward, Calif., I am really traveling to Dementia.
Thinking of it this way allows for magic to happen — for her to remember my name suddenly and to know my husband — and for there to be a boundary between me and the treacherous drop of despair. Each time I go to see her, it’s different. I’ve learned to set expectations aside, like an umbrella on a sunny morning.
One late afternoon in 1993, when the air cracked with spice and decay and the precise chill of what was to come, I picked up the kitchen wall phone and dialed my father in Florida. Even then, we spoke rarely — once or twice a year. I didn’t call him because his wife always answered the phone. He didn’t call me because — well, I don’t know.
I was 25 that autumn, living in the rural township of Center City, Minnesota, with my husband and children: Sophie, a feisty foal at two, and Max, a round-bellied baby just stretching past colic. Our old Victorian home, all gingerbread and sloping floorboards, overlooked North Center Lake, and, although I didn’t yet see this, all that wide open blue made for a painterly but desolate view. I was lonely in those years, full of longing. I imagined, as many do, especially in the liquid dreamscape of new parenthood, that I might finally speak to my parents about certain lost things, like my childhood. On this singular fall day, I wanted to understand what my father knew about my stepfather Mafia, the other man I called daddy. The man who, with his strong hairy hands, shaped me into the woman I would become.
Historical fiction, at its best, is a visceral, not academic, enterprise. It provides dual pleasures to the reader: the pleasure of time travel and the pleasure of time’s echo. It’s one thing to know intellectually that history repeats itself and another to see history enacted through a well-crafted, defamiliarizing narrative. The echoes I heard in “Forbidden City” — narcissistic leadership, a revenge-thirsty body politic, women and girls treated as things — both unsettled and compelled me to consider the present anew. I can think of no higher praise for this ambitious and impressive novel.
With so many different characters, each with a distinctive personality and back story, we are also likely to see at least parts of ourselves. This is the other danger lurking in the pages, and from this we cannot look away. The questions are as haunting as they are inevitable: What might I do in these circumstances? How far would I be willing to go? In our answers, we are bound to feel unease. If we’re honest with ourselves, that is.
Book Lovers is a beautiful homage to eldest sisters everywhere, those who feel the pressure to stand in and mother their younger siblings well into adulthood.
Emily Henry explores familial obligation and at what point you're giving too much to those you love that it becomes detrimental to your own wellbeing.
I learned about negative space in art class.
My teacher said, without the emptiness
between the objects, they would clash
into each other and become one.