This is particularly important considering Masad presents an inclusive and intersectional cast across race, class, age, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
#Aram backtrack full
The novel is nearly free of “extras” and bit characters each person Maggie knows or encounters is fully rounded and given an identity full of complexity. These vignettes from the distant past also help to accomplish what is arguably Masad’s largest triumph: superb and cohesive character development. 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. Interwoven among the straightforward sections of present action, Maggie’s journey is at times put on pause for chronologically scattered backstory told from Iris’s perspective, snippets of a secret life kept from her children. This sequence leading up to Maggie’s departure is, perhaps, drawn out a stretch too long but, it is filled with deft scaffolding and subtle clues to the novel’s ultimate trajectory. When reviewing Iris’s will, Maggie finds five letters addressed to men she’s never met and makes the impromptu decision to learn more about the recipients. With help from Iris’s old synagogue, a ceremony comes together and Maggie serves as a pallbearer.
There, Maggie finds her father, Peter, helpless in mourning, so she takes on the responsibility of identifying the body and making arrangements. Louis to Southern California, where she grew up. With this news broken, they quickly get Maggie packed and headed on a flight from St. At the time of the call, Maggie is being eaten out by her relatively recent girlfriend, Lucia. To backtrack, All My Mother’s Lovers begins with Maggie receiving news, via a phone call from her younger brother, Ariel, that her mother, Iris, has died. 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. Yes, All My Mother’s Lovers has an air of mystery to it, there are textbook elements of road trip and discovery narratives but, it is ultimately a story about self-acceptance, one with some fresh and much-needed updates to boot.
Through Maggie’s thought processes, Masad successfully subverts readers’ expectations of her novel’s classic premise too. Of course, she realizes, this may all be moot.” Masad grants Maggie this kind of meta-awareness throughout the novel, which allows her to veer into or steer away from traditional narrative patterns.ĭespite Maggie’s attention to these cinematic tropes, Masad still sets her up to have such assumptions regularly proven wrong, much to the debut’s strength and enjoyment. Lone girl in search of the truth, she thinks, or child looking for her mother’s secret life.
#Aram backtrack movie
A third of the way through Ilana Masad’s All My Mother’s Lovers, Maggie Krause, our protagonist, prepares to leave her father and younger brother holding shiva while she sets out to deliver, in person, a handful of letters left by her mother, who unexpectedly died in a car accident: “As the garage door opens in front of her, revealing shadowy six o’clock light, she has the uncanny feeling of being inside a movie again.
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