Omega Farm
A Memoir
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
*A New Yorker and Vogue Best Book of 2023*
“Compelling... [McPhee] positions herself neither as victim nor saint but as someone who, she says, only wants to be good.” —The Washington Post
A moving memoir from an award-winning novelist—a riveting account of her complicated, bohemian childhood and her return home to care for her ailing mother.
In March 2020, Martha McPhee, her husband, and their two children set out for her childhood home in New Jersey, where she finds herself grappling simultaneously with a mother slipping into severe dementia and a house that’s fallen into neglect. As Martha works to manage her mother’s care and the sprawling, ramshackle property—a broken septic system, invasive bamboo, dying ash trees—she is swept back, unwillingly, into memories of her fraught, dysfunctional childhood.
In this masterful exploration of a complicated family legacy, McPhee “makes no effort to spare her own flaws even as she searches for the roots of her mature turmoil in the shortcomings of adults who failed in the fundamental task of protecting her younger self” (BookPage). Omega Farm is an “expansive” (New Yorker) testament to hope in the face of suffering, and a courageous tale about how returning home can offer a new way to understand the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist McPhee (An Elegant Woman) delivers a piercing account of her unexpected return to her childhood home during the Covid-19 pandemic. When McPhee was five, she and her three sisters followed their mother, photographer Pryde Brown, from Princeton, N.J., to the eponymous estate in rural New Jersey after Pryde divorced her husband, writer John McPhee, and moved in with still-married therapist Dan Sullivan. When she was 11, McPhee awoke one night to find Sullivan sexually abusing her. She remained haunted by memories of the assault into adulthood—"he pleasure and the shame and the guilt, the desire to protect, the fear, wanting to be good"—which complicated her decision to move back to the farm in 2020 so she could care for her mother, who had been diagnosed with dementia. McPhee parallels the extensive physical repairs she made to the farm with her efforts to repair herself by confronting the ways her mother helped enable Sullivan's abuse. She balances these tough truths with tenderness, as when she credits Pryde for believing in her dreams of becoming a writer despite her academic struggles ("She saw deep into the future—where the dreams of the present could become manifest if believed"). The result is a courageous self-examination made of equal parts candor and compassion.
