THE WEDDING PEOPLE by Alison Espach

Phoebe Stone checks into the luxurious Newport, Rhode Island hotel wearing a green silk dress and gold heels and carrying no luggage. Everyone at the resort believes she is a guest of the wedding taking place at the hotel later that week. She’s not. Phoebe has other plans until she meets the bride and groom. The bride, Lila, wants to make the week’s events and her wedding day perfect. Nothing to Phoebe has felt so effortless and meaningful in quite some time other than talking to the groom, Gary. Through chance connections and emotional revelations, the characters imagine another way, another life.     

Favorite line(s): Will she be there to hold his hand as he dies? They always imagined him dying first, something to do with him being a man, but also both his grandparents dying of lung cancer. They always imagined themselves as people who would never retire but would spend long summers on decadent cruises, going down the Nile while writing their books. Their children would be happy at college. And they have thought about this so many times, it’s like it has already happened. She can see them, reading in the mornings, taking walks at four in the afternoon just before the sun sets in winter. Asking each other periodically, Do you think the kids are happy? But she doesn’t really want this now, after everything that’s happened between them. She has spent too much time killing him off in her head. Killing herself off in her head. And now they are back, but they are different, because nobody comes back from the dead the same. You emerge always with a little bit of the underworld on you, the lesion, the scar, having seen unspeakable things.

LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE  by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

The fiction equivalent of a Wes Anderson movie, Long Island Compromise, is a quirky, snarky tale of a wealthy Long Island dysfunctional Jewish family with enough generational trauma to damage even the generation who benefits from the successes of its Holocaust survivor forebearers. Carl runs the family business until he is kidnapped in 1980 from his driveway. His wife, two sons, and daughter all fumble through various identities, accomplishments, and failures because of Carl’s inability to instill in his children a sense of safety and fortitude after he retreats inward with prescription meds. Are they victims? And if so, of what? Brodesser-Akner wonders through these characters how any of us come through life honestly.  

Favorite line(s): Indeed, the one glance he’d taken at his mother had nearly knocked him over. His mother and grandmother, for as long as he remembered, had been a duo of huddled, conniving manipulator worrywarts whose primary job was to manage the ongoing crisis of his catatonic father, and then raise Beamer and his siblings with whatever energy they had left over, which was none. If Ruth had been a loving, caring, expansive woman when she first married and had kids, in the years since Carl’s kidnapping, her proximity to her mother-in-law and their shared goal of lying across Carl like he was a grenade had curdled into resemblance. In other words, Beamer’s mother had some derision for how controlling his grandmother was; she did not have the self-awareness to understand that she was exactly the same way.

WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON’T TALK ABOUT: FIFTEEN WRITERS BREAK THE SILENCE edited by Michele Filgate

“Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them,” writes Michele Filgate, editor of this collection of fifteen essays, about the often fraught and complicated questions about the relationship between a mother and child. Several essays, Dylan Landis’s “16 Minetta Lane” and Leslie Jamison’s “I Met Fear on the Hill,” delve into who their mother was before having children and what her life became after. A few, about growing up in abusive homes, Alexander Chee’s “Xanadu” and Kiese Laymon’s “While These Things Feel American to Me” are heartwrenching without self-pitying. Some find a sweet spot between the realization moms are far from perfect, but still, their love is everything.  

Favorite line(s): My mother was giving voice to the past, to those who couldn’t tell their own stories. Storytelling is a fight against forgetting, against loss and even mortality. Every time a story is told about someone who’s dead, it’s a resurrection. Every time a story is told about the past, we’re doubly alive.