All My Mother's Lovers

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Going through her mother’s papers, she finds envelopes addressed to five different men whose names she doesn’t recognize. This mystery, her sadness, and her lasting anger all come together to cause Maggie to forgo sticking around for her mother’s shiva.

This book overwhelmingly provided value to me as a reading/listening experience and I can't wait for Ms. When Maggie's mother Iris dies in a car accident, she leaves a small pile of letters addressed to men Maggie has never heard of. Maggie and her mother, Iris, weren't close, especially since Maggie came out, but she never thought they would run out of time to figure each other out.Masad has written a melancholy and memorable reminder of how little we often know about the people who raise us, not just as caretakers, but as human beings with hopes and heartaches. All My Mother’s Lovers is a revelatory title for it divulges at the very outset exactly what we are going to find out eventually. What she’d thought were work trips were often dalliances; what she’d thought was a perfect marriage wasn’t (certainly not by sitcom standards).

She lives a self-medicated life as a put upon emotional voyeur whose level of sarcasm is only matched by her ability to bully her family and friends any time she is strained. Her essays, reviews, and other writings have been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, and Elle among others.So the conflict at the heart of this book is not about the learning of an uncomfortable truth but how we grapple with the surfacing of new realities about a person we were certain we knew.

Maggie very much is trying to figure out who she is as a person still and how that role might change now that she lost her mother.This remarkable portrait of a daughter’s opaque relationship with her mother reflects the strangeness and beauty of coming to see one’s parent fully as a human being. I was reminded of *The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo* when I finished, and I think fans of that book will love this one, too.