Review by Booklist Review
English author Myerson (The Stopped Heart, 2016) plays with the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in her latest wrenching novel, which echoes the author's struggles with her adolescent son, as documented in her memoir, The Lost Child (2010). Here, the child is a girl, an only child, but the central conflict between mother and drug-addicted child remains. Directly and painfully, the novelist narrator (who, like all the characters in the novel, is nameless) addresses her daughter, towards whom she has a hard time conjuring the slightest trace of tenderness any longer. "I can't see anything there to love or even to like," she admits to herself with deep shame. As the daughter descends deeper into addiction despite stints in treatment, the narrator also deals with the death of her own estranged mother and recalls a depressing affair with a controlling and distant married man. This is a novel of addiction and a family coming apart at the seams. Relentlessly bleak and unswervingly self-lacerating, it's a maternal horror story that cuts to the emotional bone.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the fiercely intelligent latest from Myerson (The Lost Child), an unnamed middle-aged novelist considers her daughter, a young woman long in the throes of drug addiction. Rather than tell a straightforward tale of familial devastation, the narrator addresses her daughter directly ("There's a night--I think this is the middle of June--when we lock you in the house") and questions her and her husband's middle-class parenting choices, as well as the ways she herself was raised and whether it's honest and worthwhile to write about a family's pain. The harrowing story of her daughter, who's been in and out of rehab and now lives on the street, includes accounts of sex in exchange for drugs ("It doesn't matter how much it hurts or frightens you, or what the consequences are, as long as they promise to fix you up"). It's interspersed with other narratives, some of which are more effective than others. Highlights include the narrator's startling and potent examination of the nature of infidelity while she carries on an emotional affair with a former lover. Less effective are her remembrances of her late mother, a cruel and unpredictable woman with whom she lost touch, which pale in comparison to the urgent material on parenting and art. While the dreariness of the subject matter might be exhausting for some, it is never overwrought on the page. Myerson's narrative is focused and powerful. Agent: Karolina Sutton, CAA. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An English writer's life descends into chaos as her daughter develops a drug addiction. "There's a night--I think this is the middle of June--when we lock you in the house," begins Myerson's winkingly titled novel. The "you" addressed throughout is the protagonist's daughter; through Myerson's intercutting narratives, we see the daughter as a bright, friendly child, later to turn violent, withdrawn, and unpredictable in the throes of IV drug use. The narrator also tells the story of her relationship with her own cruel mother, whose cold and critical demeanor finally ends in an estrangement that lasts until the older woman dies. (The narrator is barred from her funeral.) Squeezed between the dual pressures of being mother to a difficult child, and daughter to a difficult mother, the narrator begins to question everything she believes about family life as well as everything she knows about writing, attempting to mentor a young writer while trying to keep her life from collapsing. Finally, there is the "he"--a man in the narrator's past who swoops in and offers a tempting (and self-sabotaging) reprieve. Myerson has already published a memoir that looked frankly at her son's addiction (The Lost Child: A Mother's Story, 2013), which was a source of controversy in the U.K. (The novel's opening sentence is one of dozens of close parallels between fictional and real events.) To title the novel Nonfiction feels less like a middle finger to critics and more like self-flagellation. The narrator is a bottomless well of self-pity, the book pressing an old bruise by imaginatively unspooling what was surely a real-life nightmare into a full-blown artistic obsession. On the one hand, this can make for emotionally claustrophobic reading; on the other, it feels, ultimately, like the truth. Both confounding and compelling. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
