Finalist for the 2021 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction From the author of Girls on Fire comes a “sharp and soulful and ferociously insightful” (Leslie Jamison) novel centered around a woman with no memory, the scientists studying her, and the daughter who longs to understand. Wendy Doe is a woman with no past and no future. Without any memory of who she is, she’s diagnosed with dissociative … who she is, she’s diagnosed with dissociative fugue, a temporary amnesia that could lift at any moment–or never at all–and invited by Dr. Benjamin Strauss to submit herself for experimental observation at his Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research. With few better options, Wendy feels she has no choice.
To Dr. Strauss, Wendy is a female body, subject to his investigation and control. To Strauss’s ambitious student, Lizzie Epstein, she’s an object of fascination, a mirror of Lizzie’s own desires, and an invitation to wonder: once a woman is untethered from all past and present obligations of womanhood, who is she allowed to become?
To Alice, the daughter she left behind, Wendy Doe is an absence so present it threatens to tear Alice’s world apart. Through their attempts to untangle Wendy’s identity–as well as her struggle to construct a new self–Wasserman has crafted an “artful meditation on memory and identity” (The New York Times Book Review) and a journey of discovery, reckoning, and reclamation. “A timely examination of memory, womanhood and power,” (Time) Mother Daughter Widow Wife will leave you “utterly riveted” (BuzzFeed).
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For a novel so steeped in questions of identity, and so engaged in exploring how the roles we inhabit—and are forced to inhabit—inform the construction of self, it’s fitting that Mother Daughter Widow Wife satisfies on a multitude of seemingly incongruent levels: as riveting page-turner; as psychologically rich and emotionally nuanced portrait of intersecting lives; as intellectually dazzling meditation on memory and trauma. As in the novels of Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, and Dana Spiotta, these elements are somehow seamlessly fused. I’d venture the reason is Wasserman’s prose, which moves at the speed of synapses firing, and is spunky and lyrical and beautifully, humanly alive.
Mother Daughter Widow Wife is suspenseful, keenly intelligent, and thoroughly engrossing. Robin Wasserman’s novel explores the complexities of memory and identity with unflinching clarity and deep compassion.
Mother Daughter Widow Wife is an utterly enthralling piece of music, sharp and soulful and ferociously insightful all at once, uncompromising in its willingness to look at the dark pulse lurking inside every love. This singular, spellbinding novel is not only an investigation of how female intimacy plays out across landscapes shaped by male power and desire, but an exploration of identity itself—the complicated alchemies of narrative, memory, desire, enthrallment and betrayal that compose us all.
Do you ever read a book that exhausts you to such a degree that you feel like you can’t read another one for at least a week? And you’re not quite sure whether that’s a good thing or not? Such is how Robin Wasserman left me.
For one thing, I spent way too much time trying to figure out who the mother, daughter, widow, and wife were. Not because it isn’t apparent, but rather because I kept thinking there had to be more to it than that. In fact, that sentiment perhaps best describes my feelings about this book: there has to be more to it than that.
Wasserman uses a non-linear timeline, taking you from the present to a few decades earlier, as she tells the story of three women: Lizzie, a neuroscientist; Alice, the daughter of a woman who’s missing; and Wendy Doe, a former patient of Lizzie’s. Each of them is at a different point in their lives, but all risk losing their sense of self, their sense of purpose. Can they be reduced to the labels of mother, daughter, widow, and wife? What about their needs and wants? What rights do they have to demand those needs and wants get met? What are they willing to defy? To sacrifice?
Parts of this book are HEAVY. They disturb you because they force you to think and feel. Wasserman demands that you consider these women and what they were willing (however reluctantly or not) to sublimate for the sake of a man. You will find yourself questioning their decisions and perhaps even sympathizing with them. But you will be exhausted. Some of the chapters take an emotional toll, whereas others feel burdensome. I’ll give this much to Wasserman: I kept turning the pages. I needed to know as much as I could about Lizzie, Alice, and Wendy.
I liked this book. I know I keep saying how tiring it was, but that isn’t because it isn’t well written or had undeveloped characters. Yes, I still have some questions. Yes, some plot points may have been resolved in ways that didn’t quite work. But Robin Wasserman made me think, and that isn’t a bad thing. I had to work for this book, both to understand its messages and to figure out how I might relate to them.
If you read this one, please let me know what you think.