“If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.”
This is two novels packaged in one book: an original short novella, and a longer sequel. They are not exactly sequels but they doo cover a lot of the same ground thematically, but more importantly, the three narrators — a mother and daughter in the first novel, and then the sister/aunt in the second, are all from the same family, so they have a shared history, even though two novels are quite distinct. First, the first novel is only about half or a quarter as long as the second; second, the second novel is much richer and more fully realized I think as well.
The first novel has two narrators and explores a woman working as a hostess in a bar (where sex work can and does happen) and is a young mother, or rather the slightly older version of a once young mother. In her narration she is exploring her life and the questions raised in her capacity as a mother, as a worker, and in discussing her life with the other women who she works with, who range in age to late teens through their fifties. In addition, the narrator thinks a lot about her mother, who died of cancer in her 30s when the narrators and her sisters were all still quite young.
The second narrator is the narrator’s teen daughter who is about to start middle school and is thinking about her life in the capacity of a young girl on the tale end of adolescence. She has teenage concerns about love, sex, her body, and friendships, and of course her relationship with her mother.
The second novel in the pairing is narrated by a woman in her late 30s who is trying to figure out if she wants to have kids. She is considering working with a sperm donation clinic or with individual sperm donors, but is hesitant in part because of a cultural aversion to both donations/in vitro as well as single parenthood. As she researches this, she reaches out to some various advocacy groups who deal with the children born from this kind of insemination and is moved by the story of man about her age, a doctor, who was born from artificial insemination, and didn’t find out about his origins until he was older, and has mostly negative feelings about it.
In addition to this, she is also working on a second novel, and her friendship with another writer and her editor leads to other important moments in the novel. She has a lot of thinking to do, and like books where the mulling of a question drives the action, there’s not much “plot” qua plot, but there’s a lot of different important moments that arise as she tries to delve into her mind on the issue. This also leads to some uncomfortable realizations about her life, her role in society, her feelings of selfhood, and just how other people see her, and would see her.
