The Long Answer
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A woman considers pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships in this profound and provocative novel.
Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna's own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the children they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in.
The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hogeland's lackluster debut follows a group of women and charts their feelings about their pregnancies. First, pregnant narrator Anna gets a call from her older sister, Margot, with the news that Margot had a miscarriage. Some weeks later, Margot calls Anna to talk about her friend Elizabeth, and Anna thinks about how she's jealous of Elizabeth's friendship with Margot, which deepened after Elizabeth, who is also pregnant, confided a secret to Margot. At a prenatal yoga class, Anna meets a young woman, Corrie, who shares a story about an earlier pregnancy followed by abortion. Then Hogeland delves into a problem with Anna's pregnancy, and her writer husband's attempts to write a story about it. Later, Anna travels to Joshua Tree, Calif., where she meets an older woman named Marisol, who tells her a story about her own pregnancy and approaching menopause, which Anna uses in her own attempt at writing fiction. The gestures at metafiction feel undercooked ("This was never supposed to be part of this novel," Anna narrates in the middle of the Marisol episode), though Hogeland does a nice job showing the degree to which the women's lives are shaped by reproduction. Still, this doesn't quite cohere.
