October 11, 2023
The Possibilities, by Yael Goldstein-Love
Considering that I am someone whose new novel contains the line, “The children we have make any other world impossible*,” a novel that’s world’s away from this one but also taps right into notions of postpartum and parental anxiety (ASKING FOR A FRIEND also contains the line, on its very first page, “Parenthood…was—if you were lucky—like friendship, a story without end. The alternative too awful to contemplate. But what this also meant, of course, was that it never stopped, there were no breaks from the possibility of something new and worse to worry about around every single corner.”) then you won’t be surprised to know that Yael Goldstein-Love’s THE POSSIBILITIES tapped into something real and fundamental in my own psyche, but it also hooked (and fascinated) me as a reader in a deep and most visceral way.
And if you’re also an anxious sort when it comes to parenting, then you will know what it means to “ride the possibilities,” what Goldstein-Love’s protagonist described as the “car swerve” feeling, where it seems like some disastrous outcome has just been averted by a hair’s breadth. (Another line from my novel—”And how do you measure that line between everything that could have happened and what actually did?**). An idea that becomes literalized in this fantastic (in all senses of the word) speculative/literary mashup in which new mom Hannah’s debilitating anxiety actually becomes a superpower as she has to voyage into the multiverse to search for her missing baby (who is missing because, for babies, the boundaries between worlds and possibilities are especially blurry and thin).
A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeline L’Engle, meets Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work? I adored this novel, which almost caused me to cancel Thanksgiving because all I wanted to do was sit down and read it straight to the end.
*This line was actually borrowed from my wise friend Rebecca Dolgoy
**The great thing about being a book blogger is that I get to quote extensively from my own book in reviews of other peoples’.
