All My Mother's Lovers

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I am actually a real live human who is a lesbian, and I was sick to death of hearing about Maggie's lesbianism by chapter 2.

Ilana Masad delivers a strong debut focused on the complexities of relationships, queerness, and gender. Well I knew I wasn't reading THE GREAT GATSBY but I still expected more of a send-off than wet panties. I felt as though Maggie was written with the same depth of character that she attributed to her mother and especially her father throughout most of the book, which is to say not much depth at all. There wouldn't have been a book at all if there was just as much open communication between the grown-ass kids and their parents as the parents had the entire time about Iris getting her sexual needs filled elsewhere. they seemed like they were really good for each other and i liked how even without taking center stage, their relationship progressed throughout the story.year old Maggie Kraus has had a strained relationship with her mother Iris ever since she told her parents that she was lesbian. There is even a sex scene that takes place in a nursing home, which brings octogenarian sex lives on to the page as well. Maggie assumes this rejection of closeness is a byproduct of “seeing such a good example in her parent’s marriage” which perhaps was “detrimental, made her standards too high, her expectations over the top. From Iris’s vantage point, we see her as a young woman married to an abusive rabbi, as a happy new mother with her second husband, and Maggie’s father, Peter. all of the lovers were equally interesting to read about, and they provided an additional sense of suspense and another layer to uncover.

lucia seemed very sweet and while we didn’t get to know her very well, which seemed like it was kind of the point, she seemed to have a very real and important connection with maggie. Going through her mother’s papers, she finds envelopes addressed to five different men whose names she doesn’t recognize.

Masad is deft and incisive about the sometimes-fraught nature of mother-daughter relationships, around which loaded subtext can seem to twist and twine like Christmas lights. As Maggie wrestles with her grief, she also struggles with anger toward her mother’s “discomfort” with her being gay and the unresolved complexity that discomfort yields. She buries her feelings in pot and booze, is incredibly rude to her younger brother (they’re both adults), dismissive of her mother, and pandering to her father.

Maggie was a fascinating, conflicted, and utterly Millennial character, and Masad's observations and reflections on late 2010s queer culture, as well as the complexities of grief and untimely death, were incredibly astute.it was very interesting to see the impact that life and love had on all of these people, and all of their different views on the situations.