Bookshop.org<\/a>, whose fees support independent bookstores.<\/p>\nAs the personal trainers, spiritual leaders and motivational speakers say, \u201cHow you do anything is how you do everything.\u201d This bit of wisdom is key to the lyrical character study that is \u201cBody Language,\u201d Meg Howrey\u2019s sardonic, smart and powerful fifth novel.<\/p>\n
In alternating, time-traveling, distinctly voiced chapters, the four quirky members of a modern Midwestern family spin on the tilted axis of Barbara, their dementia-impaired matriarch. The precision with which each woman is painted attaches the reader to the characters and the characters to the plot. As is true of the best novels, the story emerges not as a scheme concocted by the author, but as an organic outcome of each character\u2019s growth over the life of the book. Howrey\u2019s own politics are here \u2014 feminist, environmentalist, activist \u2014 but believably portioned out to her characters.<\/p>\n
Sloane, the eldest, is an L.A.-based actor and therapist, a feminist in the throes of menopause. \u201cPerimenopausal brain fog was a real thing, though like nearly every other perimenopausal symptom it was tricky to distinguish from about a hundred other medical conditions,\u201d Sloane tells us. \u201cWomen had needed to prove they could have their periods \u2026 and fly planes, perform surgeries, run governments. They still had to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Laurel, 45, works at a Seattle environmental nonprofit. While mothering her two teenagers, one of them newly identifies as nonbinary \u2014 \u201cIt was Laurel\u2019s job to not make a big deal about this\u201d \u2014 she obsesses about her husband\u2019s questionable fidelity. \u201cIn her socioeconomic group they were all Cool or Hot Moms. Some of her friends liked to call themselves Bad Moms, which was a way of boasting how you weren\u2019t an over-engaged, hypervigilant, insufferable type of mom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nun-novice and anti-gun violence activist Nanette, 35, has been carrying her mother\u2019s secret for five years, not knowing whether one or both of her sisters had been entrusted with it too. \u201cIf it happens and I don\u2019t seem to know it,\u201d Barbara had told her youngest, \u201cthen you have to say, \u2018Mom, you have Alzheimer\u2019s and now you need to do what you planned\u2019 \u2026 Sometimes you hear people say, \u2018Oh, put me on an ice floe and shove me out to sea. They don\u2019t have a plan. I have a plan. I mean it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The book opens shortly after its precipitating event. Barbara has summoned her three daughters to her suburban Indiana home, saying she needs their help. Only when they arrive from their various locales, carrying their various loads of secrets, generosity and resentments, do the daughters discover what kind of help their mother wants. Barbara has cast her offspring in a command performance as the assisters in her assisted suicide.<\/p>\n
How will each of Barbara\u2019s daughters respond to her mother\u2019s wish to die? The way they do everything, of course, as evidenced by the siblings\u2019 meeting in their mother\u2019s garage, attempting to resolve their seemingly irreconcilable differences about their mother\u2019s fate and their parts in it. Anyone who\u2019s lived the hell of a parent\u2019s descent into Alzheimer\u2019s will recognize the whiplash of intermittent lucidity when Sloane tells Barbara, \u201cWe just have some things to do in the garage,\u201d and Barbara snaps back, \u201cI can be alone for ten minutes. You don\u2019t have to make things up.\u201d<\/p>\n
And anyone who\u2019s ever been a sibling in a family crisis will recognize the dynamic of that meeting. Three sisters, three clashing opinions, limitless wrath. No one of them can be right without the other two being wrong.<\/p>\n
Sloane held out the envelope of pills. \u201cJust to be clear, Nanette. You think Laurel and I should leave, and you should give Mom these.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d Nanette said. It wasn\u2019t that Nanette disagreed. It was wrong to hurt yourself, because everything about you was God\u2019s wish. But God had made her mother as she was, and the person she was wanted to die.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe could just end up in a coma,\u201d Sloane said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are ones for nausea and ones that will put her to sleep and ones that will stop her heart,\u201d Laurel explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you agree with Nanette\u2019s plan?\u201d Sloane says.<\/p>\n
\u201cNone of us can do it,\u201d Laurel said. \u201cIt\u2019s illegal. We could go to jail.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t care about that,\u201d Nanette said. \u201cI answer to a higher authority.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll their lives,\u201d Sloane thinks, \u201cwomen had to fight for rights over their own bodies \u2026 Even now, women had to form a secret coven, in a garage in Indiana, to help another woman exercise her choice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMom had a plan,\u201d Laurel says. \u201cShe told herself, \u2018Oh, just put me on an ice floe \u2014\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSoon no one will be able to say that,\u201d Sloane says. \u201cBecause the ice floes will all have melted.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are novels about the ties that bind wildly disparate sisters (\u201cLittle Women\u201d comes to mind) and novels about women contemplating suicide (Sylvia Plath\u2019s \u201cThe Bell Jar\u201d) and novels about grown daughters making pilgrimages to their aged mothers (\u201cTom Lake\u201d by Ann Patchett). There\u2019s the novel adapted into a movie, \u201cStill Alice,\u201d about a female Alzheimer\u2019s sufferer contemplating suicide, and there are novels that use humor to satirize dead-serious social issues (\u201cPride and Prejudice,\u201d \u201cCatch-22,\u201d \u201cJames\u201d by Percival Everett).<\/p>\n
What Howrey delivers with \u201cBody Language\u201d is a novel that covers all that ground while keeping the reader on the edge of their seat, alternately howling with laughter, holding their breath awaiting resolution, and weeping. We can only hope that the way she did this book, with her finger on the pulse of all that moves us, is the way she\u2019ll do the next one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A mother summons her three adult daughters home to Indiana in the author\u2019s expertly-crafted fifth novel. Their disparate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[180432,129333,24264,6193,9342,180429,48,52,51,46674,47,50,49,180430,11468,6316,180431,7755,3230,180428,1557],"class_list":["post-457197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-assisted-suicide","tag-barbara","tag-book","tag-character","tag-daughter","tag-good-novel","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-laurel","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-meg-howrey","tag-mom","tag-mother","tag-nanette","tag-one","tag-plan","tag-sloane","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}