A young mother finds herself having flashbacks of a childhood friend, April, who was murdered in a pre-cable-news case of maternal filicide. This repressed memory surfaces during a performance of (cue symbolism!) "Medea," natch (also wait for the descriptions of mother mice eating their young). Luckily, Elizabeth has a background in journalism (war correspondence, no less), so she begins to dig into the story with a vague idea towards turning it into a docudrama. Along the way, she begins to see disturbing similarities between Adele, her friend's mother, and her own life. When does understanding the motives for such a horrific crime cross the line into empathy?
Kogan connects the mother-daughter relationships between Adele's family and Elizabeth's, in some cases too well. They all started to blur together after a while, whether it's Adele and her mother, Elizabeth and hers, Adele and April, or Elizabeth and her daughters Tess and Daisy. The moms are all stressed, depressed, and repressed, to varying degrees, to the point that I had a hard time keeping track of which childhood trauma belonged to whom. Was it Adele who walked in on her mother's suicide attempt, or Elizabeth? Was it April whose mom forgot cupcakes for her birthday, or Tess? If you believe Kogan, every mother out there is one broken dish, one missed flight home, one late period away from a complete breakdown. Postpartum depression in her world is as common as hangnails.
And the men fare even worse. They're absent fathers and indifferent husbands, workaholics, cheaters, rapists, womanizers, wife beaters, and they probably leave their dirty socks on the floor, too. One husband even dares to want non-vanilla sex with his wife! The sick b*st*rd. Again, the male characters are in large part interchangeable. Whether they're ignoring their wives out of malice or cluelessness, the lesson here seems to be, you simply can't count on them, ever. If a woman is slowly disintegrating into a puddle of hormones and MAOI inhibitors, it's because a man screwed up somehow.
This is unfortunate, because it's a story that needs to be told and a topic that needs to be addressed, just not with this level of melodrama and alarmism. Had Kogan stopped with having Adele herself suffering from postpartum psychosis, the book would have been far more powerful. Instead, she beats us about the head with stories of motherhood gone wrong, conflating Adele's crippling depression with every little bump and setback that besets Elizabeth. Look, I felt bad for Andrea Yates as much as humanly possible, given what she'd done, and I thought her husband deserved the chair for his role in the tragedy. But Kogan seems less interested in exploring what happens in incredibly rare circumstances, than in painting a horror story about how any woman could kill her kids at any time. There's an uncomfortable whiff of me-tooism here, as though Kogan wants to glom onto the pain of postpartum depression to make a point about how hard it is for all mothers. (I should have sensed trouble when I saw that Ayelet Waldman had written a blurb. Waldman is an entertaining writer, but having her endorse your book about motherhood is a little like George Bush showing up at John McCain's campaign events - no good can come of the association.)
By the end of the book *I* felt depressed - also terrified and with a violent urge to refill my birth control. I was desperate for any glimpse of warmth or happiness amid all the bleak despair - a loving embrace between a husband and wife, or a mother feeling grateful for her kids, rather than burdened by them. Hell, the arrival of the ice cream truck would have helped lighten the mood a little. Reading "Between Here and April," it's hard to remember that for most mothers (and fathers!), children are a joy. Yes, those for whom this isn't the case deserve a voice, too. But Kogan doesn't so much give them a voice as throw them a big communal voyeuristic pity-party.
