All My Mother's Lovers

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Maggie is a member of the “LGBTQIA2S+” community with an awareness of the privilege of being a “native English speaker with a flat accent,” and a name “signaling whiteness” — all of which casts an exciting, fresh, contemporary character, who still unfortunately falls into clichés of plot. More of Iris’s history is revealed to Maggie directly as she hunts down the truth, filling in the gaps between what Maggie learns and Iris omitted.

The love does not ful­ly excuse the lack of accep­tance, and the pre­ma­ture loss of the par­ent stamps out the hope that com­mu­ni­ca­tion will, some­how, grow easier. All My Mother’s Lovers is engaging, and confident, and often wry, but it unfortunately does not satisfyingly resolve the mysteries we readers want solved. To Maggie Krause, the 27-year-old protagonist of Ilana Masad’s debut novel, “ All My Mother’s Lovers,” mom Iris exists in her mind as the composite of a few infuriating adjectives: absent — often traveling for her job as a corporate event planner; unaccepting — of Maggie’s homosexuality; unenlightened — and worse, willfully so. All My Mother’s Lovers is abeau­ti­ful cel­e­bra­tion of this con­ti­nu­ity, and the val­ue of com­mu­ni­ca­tion across generations. These mothers micromanage their daughters, actively refuse to acknowledge the validity of their words or choices, and instill a sense of insecurity and helplessness in their offspring.

I was put off in the beginning, but I am glad to have hung in there and see how ultimately the grief and loss does reveal to Maggie how amazing Iris, her mother, was. A child is no match for this warrior queen and, more dangerously, will internalize the messages communicated by her. Where the novel kicks into gear is when Maggie finds, with her mother’s will, a collection of five sealed letters written by Iris with a request they “be sent out in the case of her untimely death. Iris seemed like the most interesting character, but her backstory just died too, with regards to Shlomo, the abusive rabbi. The novel’s plot presents many opportunities for flat and convenient character work, but, here again, the author navigates around easy traps and pitfalls.

It’s estimated that half of us, plus or minus, hit the jackpot and have mothers who range from “great” to “good enough. Masad—who is an excellent book critic—recognizes the predictable and formulaic movements of literary archetypes and manages to complicate many of them during Maggie’s journey while still holding onto engaging forward movement, and the pacing particularly picks up once Maggie hits the road.Open” warfare characterizes this kind of interaction, though I have put “open” in quotation marks for a reason. When Iris dies in a car crash, Maggie flies home to reckon with a prickly college-age brother, a deflated father nearly catatonic in his grief — with whom Iris always appeared to have a sitcomishly perfect relationship — and the task of interacting with a string of sympathetic strangers, which she finds more than a little annoying.

This mystery, her sadness, and her lasting anger all come together to cause Maggie to forgo sticking around for her mother’s shiva. The response, alas, is inevitably the mother’s further withdrawal, often accompanied by complete denial about what took place.Such is one of the most vital questions brought forth in Ilana Masad’s debut novel, All My Mother’s Lovers: Who are the people that made us, and how do they shape who we become? The premise should have worked in theory, but I felt like every time we switched POV, the pacing stopped abruptly.

Since I’m neither a therapist nor a psychologist, the names I’ve given them aren’t scientific but chosen for clarity. It is, alas, easier to recognize that you are playing the role of Cinderella (and it was an evil mom, not a stepmother until the Grimm Brothers cleaned up the tale) when you are living in the cellar and everyone knows your mother is a hag.

But it also brings her clarity — perhaps the one welcome side effect of heart-rending loss — about the relationship back home that she’s forever anxious of sabotaging; and about the mother she never quite saw: a woman more evolved, less judgmental, and more resilient — just like her indefatigable daughter — than Maggie ever gave her credit for.