The Mothers

“It was strange learning the contours of another's loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.”

There's no denying, I like Bennett's prose and I won't shy away from trying her future books, but I wish this book wasn't so one-sided. There was barely any character development, on the contrary, some of them were predictably villainized by having them make absurd decisions. The first half of the book was very promising, it seemed that Bennett would present a balanced view on the issue however, by the halfway point things were falling apart fast and the characters seemed more like caricatures making foolish choices just because it suited something that looked more and more like a narrow-minded, preachy agenda. I don't agree with Brit Bennett's interpretation of life and motherhood, but I still enjoyed her writing.

Update : Apparently Bennett is not anti-choice, at least not based on what she says in one particular interview: "I didn't want it to be melodramatic. I didn't want it to be, “this girl gets an abortion and it ruins her life.” That narrative is pretty common in pop culture. I wanted it to be a decision that she thinks and feels deeply about, but not something that defines her, or something that ruins her life." But the thing is, melodramatic is was. And it did define and ruin Nadia's life. Because of it she couldn't move past Luke and it made no sense. They had nothing in common, they didn't even love each other, they only dated briefly and slept together when she was seventeen and he was twenty one. They were both immature and she was grieving for mother. But somehow, years later, she ends up betraying her best friend by sleeping with him again when he was married with said best friend. She betrayed her dreams and wasted her intelligence and education by never finding satisfaction in her life away from that place. Even after 7 years she is still hung up on that dead cul-the-sac back in California. She is still friends with Audrey a girl who doesn't have any aspirations in life other being married and relentlessly trying to get pregnant with a child that her husband does not want. She goes to fertility doctors on her own when her husband refuses to go with her sending a clear message. A husband who has the emotional intelligence of a tiger cub. A husband who is not in love with her, fact she is well aware of. A husband who cheats on her, who would have abandoned her if only Nadia had told him she loved him. There is no hopeful moment for Nadia. There is no moving on. She finds no meaningful connections while she is away with her scholarship studying. She lets herself dragged down by her past and people who are toxic to her and she never grows as a person. She never stops being toxic herself. She is still the same 17 year old girl even when she's supposed to be in her mid-thirties. So how did this not ruing her life? Just because she managed to get a few degrees and become a lawyer doesn't mean she's got it together. We never even find out if becoming a lawyer even means anything to her. In the end, the loudest voice belongs to the chorus of uneducated, church-going old ladies, "The Mothers". How does this narrative do any justice to Nadia?It's nice and all to find out what the author meant while she was writing this book, but it would've been better if it actually reflected these intentions. To me at least, they were lost in translation.