How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A funny and moving novel about love, loss, and new beginnings found on an unlikely road trip
Most days, Magda is fine. She has her routines. She has her anxious therapy patients, who depend on her to cure their bad habits. She has her longtime colleagues, whose playful bickering she mediates. She’s mourning the recent loss of her best friend, Sara, but has brokered a tentative truce with Sara’s prickly widower as she helps him sort through the last of Sara’s possessions. She’s fine.
But in going through Sara’s old journal, Magda discovers her friend’s last directive: plans for a road trip they would take together in celebration of Magda’s upcoming seventieth birthday. So, with Sara’s urn in tow, Magda decides to hit the road, crossing the country and encountering a cast of memorable characters—including her sister, from whom she’s been keeping secrets. Along the way she stumbles upon a jazz funeral in New Orleans and a hilarious women’s retreat meant to “unleash one’s divine feminine energy” in Texas, and meets a woman who challenges her conceptions of herself—and the hidden truths about her friendship with Sara.
As the trip shakes up her careful routines, Magda finally faces longings she locked away years ago and confronts questions about her sexuality and identity she thought she had long put to rest. And as she soon learns, it’s never too late to start your next journey.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dey Street editor Montague debuts with a delightful if uneven story of a 70-year-old woman exploring her queer identity. Magda Eklund, a psychiatrist in New York City, refuses to come to terms with the death of her best friend, Sara, reacting to the news by throwing herself into her work. After Sara's widower off-loads Sara's possessions and her ashes on Magda, she stumbles upon Sara's plans for a road trip to celebrate Magda's 70th birthday. Magda decides to take the trip on her own, with Sara's ashes in tow, hoping to make peace with the unrequited love she felt for Sara. Her journey eventually brings her to a Texas women's retreat, where she meets Judy, a lesbian in her 60s going through a messy divorce. It takes a while for the novel to find its footing, but Magda is a companionable heroine and her travels are portrayed evocatively, as she manages to hunt down Sara's childhood home in New Orleans and finds closure at the Georgia O'Keeffe museum in New Mexico, which Sara had always wanted to visit. This earnest road novel has plenty of appeal.