Amanda is a successful book editor at a prominent publishing house in New York City. Thea is a stay-at-home mother of three who has never really left the community in which she grew up. Amanda, eight months’ pregnant with her first child, and her husband move in next door to Thea and her family, and the two women find themselves both drawn to and repelled by each other and their opposing choices in the constant struggle to balance career and family life.
When a disaster forces Amanda and her family to take refuge in Thea’s home, the underlying tensions simmering between them are forced to the surface-and even more so when Thea fills in as Amanda’s temporary nanny. But once dead animals start appearing on Thea’s front porch-surely a macabre gift from Amanda?-the battle with “the other mother” begins in earnest.
With a keen eye for what pulls us apart and what brings us together, Gwendolen Gross has created a stunning, dark, suspenseful novel that is as brave as it is shocking.
Maybe Thea resented Amanda moving into the house that once belonged to her childhood best friend. Perhaps Amanda was jealous of Thea's effortless domestic skills. Or maybe Thea couldn't approve of Amanda's decision to return to work after the birth of her daughter Malena, while Amanda failed to understand how Thea could find fulfillment as the stay-at-home mom of three. Whatever the reasons, it soon becomes clear that there is ample potential for animosity between these two neighbors, and the hostilities only escalate once Amanda's family is forced to move in with Thea's after their house is extensively damaged during a violent storm and Thea offers to become Malena's nanny. When dead animals start showing up on Thea's doorstep, however, Amanda is her first suspect, and, suddenly, whatever petty differences the two families may have had take on sinister new meaning. By using the alternating points of view of each intensely multifaceted woman, Gross paints an electrifyingly complex and explosively gripping portrait of contemporary, have-it-all motherhood. Haggas, Carol
Gwendolen Gross's 5 Best Evers from Chick Lit Is Not Dead Why we love her: Her writing is beautifully lyrical! Her latest:When She Was Gone
CHICK LIT IS NOT DEAD PRESENTS...GWENDOLEN GROSS'S 5 BEST EVERS BEST SONG: This is a complicated thing, music in general. I grew up listening to loud classical music, NPR, and the Beatles. I sat on the living room rug and mourned the fab four since I was born too late. I studied opera in college and loved it--but also loved a good U2 fest in the 'sco.
Brandi Carlile's "That Wasn't Me" is a whole novel and makes me strong and weepy each playing. I'm a sucker for lyrics, I guess, but also for a hopeful melodic resolution. Folding up childhood and now, I'd say today's favorite song is already almost an oldie, but so beloved for the lyrics and Jack Johnson's absurdly sexy voice: "Do You Remember?" The locked bikes in the song, the piano that took up the living room--well, I met my husband in college, when we still rode bikes to class and cooked for 45 at the co-op, so I'm in love with that song every time I hear it the way I'm in love with my husband every time I see him.
BEST BOOK: This question stumps me every time, because books are like friends, and I don't like to pick out a best. Still, here's a best book I am considering this second: The Wife by Meg Wolitzer. Meg's writing is so smart, funny, sly, and specific; I love all her books. But The Wife has the kind of slow-build-to-a-twist that makes me slap my thigh with delight just remembering it. She has a new one coming out soon--The Interestings. I can't wait.
BEST MOVIE: "Singin' In The Rain," despite the odious apostrophe. I sing along, I dance it whenever there's rain. So much lightness, so much joy in someone running up the walls and across the ceiling. I wanted to be in that movie. I was a short girl with a terrific voice and relatively little glamour, so Debbie Reynolds and her scarf wooed me. Funny faces and Moses Supposes--it never gets old to me.
BEST LIFE MOMENT: Many, many, especially birth of children and marriage proposal, but I'll write about another one because I just watched the Budweiser Clydesdale commercial and it makes me ridiculously mushy:
When I was fourteen, my dad leased a horse for me for a month ($50, for you horse people out there). We didn't have a trailer, so I rode George home from the farm to our summer house in Vermont, where I kept him in a cow barn at a neighbor's house and rode him bareback every day. George was a huge, out of shape quarter horse, and I had to climb atop the hood of the car to get on his back. There was a lot of creative boredom in Vermont--my sisters and I read everything we could from the Greensboro library and concocted our own ginger ale (spicy! Exploding bottles!) and made face paint by grinding up rocks with other rocks. My sister was away the summer of George, and I remember one ride in particular (the visiting the neighbor's new baby trip where he got stung by a whole swarm of bees does not rank in the best column!) where I went down the dirt road and over Barr Hill on a dirt track where we cross-country skied in winter. There was an old apple orchard where we stopped for a rest, the smell of timothy grass and banks of Shire-worthy moss, hills like green-back bears, and when George jumped over a fallen log, it felt like flying.
BEST ADVICE: Make mistakes. Having studied music--which, like many arts, has a history of perfectionist pedagogy, I know that sometimes the mistakes are the most beautiful interpretations. Sometimes they're mistakes. Sometimes all the colors muddled together just doesn't look good and you end up with mud, but sometimes the mistakes are where the joy lives. Also, I love being a beginner, because it gives me permission to screw up, and with permission to screw up, I'll try jumping log to log and make it over the whole river in one breath. I seem to have lost my metaphor here, but what I mean to say is that fear of mistakes can keep you from ever leaving the ground. This works with kids, too--sometimes they have to do for the joy of doing, not because they're always striving for best, most perfect, strongest, fastest, winning. Those things are not always the most interesting or enduring.
I hadn't done much riding since George when my daughter decided she wanted to take lessons. Five years later, we have become crazy horse people, and we own a large pony/small horse who has dumped us in the dust because he's afraid of a noise, or he doesn't want to jump that crossrail, just enough times to remind us that it's a collaborative process, flying across the earth. When I'm afraid of mistakes, he knows the minute I come to collect him in the paddock, and he is nervous, too. Confidence begets confidence, as long as there are no scary blue tarps rustling unexpectedly in the wind...
My husband is used to my being engrossed in books, but he finally said "Hey, let's do something else!" That's a compliment to Ms. Gross.
I loved the book. I loved the way both points of view were made clearly through Amanda and Thea with opposing viewpoints that will never, ever mesh. I am not someone who rushes off to hold someone else's newborn, but I enjoyed the book, found the characters believable, the descriptions lush, and the interaction with the husbands quite true-to-life.
The ending held surprises, and I also liked the dynamics of the women's constant judgment of one another--so very true.
Yes, the underlying issue of this book is the opposing viewpoints and ideologies of one mom against another--in this case the SAHM versus the mom going back to work. But Gwendolen Gross also hits the nail on the head about the way that other women size each other up--in looks, husbands, children's behavior, volunteer work, and gardens to name a few. She also perfectly captures a mother's love, from the beauty of a newborn baby to the tender release of your firstborn into adulthood and everything in between.
This book is not only beautifully written, but the human drama creates tension that causes this book to be a real page-turner.
On the surface, The Other Mother is about the mommy-wars, specifically whether or not to go back to work after the baby is born. Told in an alternating first-person narrative by two suburban mothers, one who works in the home as a SAHM (that's stay at home mom for those of you like me you may not know. I kept seeing that on message boards wondering what in the world it was until finally a friend filled me in) and one who continues to work outside the home. The story centers around that choice and the judgments the two women hold for one another and themselves as they struggle to come to terms with the decisions they've made. But it's also about something larger. There are no good guys and bad guys here. As I fell into this story, I identified with both of the women, feeling along with them their joys and resentments, fears and suspicions. It's a story about being a woman in an internal and external landscape that is constantly changing. It's a story about relationship and history and love. And at its heart, mystery: the mysteries we all live with all the time, the questions we ask ourselves and the shifting answers. The Other Mother reminded me that there's a conversation taking place. Sometimes we speak the words to one another and sometimes we only whisper them in the most private rooms in our hearts, but we are all telling our stories, learning our truths, changing our minds and walking the paths of womanhood, sisterhood, wifehood, self. The writing here is both lush and precise, the details sensual. I found myself stopping to savor. The Other Mother presents a true and familiar world in a thoughtful way that leaves you with much to ponder.
