Samantha Raymond’s life is coming apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at 53 she finds herself staring into “the Mids”—that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood and mortality.
When she stumbles across a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood of Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter in a country that’s falling apart at the seams.
Because it allows a menopausal woman to be interesting, rather than relegating her to a stock turn as a harpy or shrew or somebody’s comically clueless mother.
Because the novel is a paean to the beauty of ruined things.
Because the New York Times reviewer gets it right when she says, “The characters stumble toward questions about the structures holding them — their bodies, homes, identities — wondering how and where to draw their borders.”
Dana Spiotta’s debut novel, Lightning Field, was a New York Times Notable Book, and subsequent books have been finalists for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fifth novel, Wayward, appeared in July to critical acclaim.
The winner of a Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Ms. Spiotta teaches creative writing at Syracuse University.