The Mother Act: A Novel - Hardcover

Reimer, Heidi

 
9780593473726: The Mother Act: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593473728 ISBN 13: 9780593473726
Verlag: Dutton, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Set against the sparkling backdrop of the theater world, this propulsive debut follows the relationship between an actress who refuses to abandon her career and the daughter she chooses to abandon instead.

Sadie Jones, a larger-than-life actress and controversial feminist, never wanted to be a mother. No one feels this more deeply than Jude, the daughter Sadie left behind. While Jude spent her childhood touring with her father’s Shakespearian theater company, desperate for validation from the mother she barely knew, Sadie catapulted to fame on the wings of The Mother Act—a scathing one-woman show about motherhood.

Two decades later, Jude is a talented actress in her own right, and her fraught relationship with Sadie has come to a scandalous head. On a December evening in New York City, at the packed premiere of Sadie’s latest play, the two come face-to-face and the intertwined stories of their lives unfold—colorfully and dramatically. What emerges is a picture of two very different women navigating the complicated worlds of career, love, and family, all while grappling with the essential question: can they ever really understand each other?

Compelling, insightful, and cleverly conveyed as a play in six acts, The Mother Act is a stylish page-turner that looks at what it means to be a devoted mother and a devoted artist—and whether it is possible to be both.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heidi Reimer is a novelist and writing coach. Her writing interrogates the lives of women, usually those bent on breaking free of what they’re given to create what they yearn for. Her front-row seat to the theater world of her debut novel, The Mother Act, began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day. She has published in Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, Literary Mama, and the anthologies The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

BEFORE THE SHOW
December 13, 2018
New York, New York

JUDE, 24


The Arianna Atwater Theatre is a West Village landmark nestled between a psychic and a sex shop, one of those old, not‑quite‑kept‑up theaters off Broadway: sweeping staircase, ornate moldings, the appointments of its former splendor battling to keep it on the right side of dingy. The carpet is stained.

“Judith Jones‑Linnen,” Jude says to the woman at the box office. She flushes, hoping her name and the fact that the tickets are comps won’t betray her identity. But if the woman knows who Jude is, she keeps her smile innocuous and hands over two tickets with no more than a chirpy “Enjoy the show.”

The lobby buzzes with an opening night’s voltage of anticipation and nerves, reserved judgment, pressure, need. Jude feels attuned to the mood of each person around her, hundreds of signals radiating outward, she their exhausted receiver. That woman in the tortoiseshell glasses—doubtless an academic, women’s studies or theater—seems guardedly hopeful about tonight’s performance. Those thirtysomethings conversing loudly, heads bent toward each other, likely know and love Sadie Jones from TV. The matron in red, around her mother’s age, probably saw the original show twenty years ago, left her husband, got a college degree, and became an art therapist whose kids never speak to her. She’s the type to wait at the stage door for an hour afterward, then bumble through a breathless declaration that Sadie Jones changed her life.

Jude’s mother may have been disgraced, but that isn’t stopping people from buying tickets.

Jude texts her father: I can’t do this.

Go, he responds immediately. Just the one word, which could be interpreted as “Go to the play” or, if she prefers, “Go home.” Knowing him and his ever‑optimistic desire for understanding between Jude and her mother, it’s probably the former.

Her phone vibrates again: You know I’d be with you if I could swing it. You can handle this. You’re the strongest person I know.

Ha. “Narrow‑minded,” “unimaginative,” and “bitch” are the words Jude’s mother leveled at her in their last confrontation. She doubts “strong” is an adjective Sadie will use to describe her in tonight’s show.

Jude tries calling her husband, Miles, despite the current impasse between them, despite his refusal to come with her tonight. She waits in the lobby, rocking from one foot to the other as people surge and pool around her. Miles does not pick up.

Finally Jude checks her coat. In front of the open double doors at the top of the stairs, an usher scans one of her tickets and offers her a program. She hesitates, then takes it reluctantly and holds it lightly between her thumb and forefinger. She hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother in more than two years, she’s avoided all photos and press about her, and the picture on the program hits her like a shock of cold water. She forces herself to study it. Sadie, curvy and abundant in a purple dress with a tasteful hint of cleavage, chunky green earrings spiraling to her shoulders. Purple and green, the two colors that show Sadie Jones to best advantage. They are Jude’s colors, too, though tonight she’s opted for neutral tones that she hopes might blend into the walls.

There are new lines at her mother’s mouth. The strawberry blonde might no longer be natural. Her expression is serious and determined with a hint of questioning, as though she’s not entirely certain she should be doing this. Except that when it comes to her career, Sadie Jones can justify anything.

The cursive mauve font reads, the long-awaited sequel to the Mother Act. Underneath that, the title, bigger, bolder: Mother/Daughter. The upside‑down “Daughter” suggests opposition, obviously. Conflict. Error. Fault.

People jostle from behind, eager feet carrying them forward and propelling Jude down the raked floor toward 3E and 3F. Their glossy programs press at her back.

...

“I can’t believe your therapist thinks it’s a good idea,” Miles said when Jude told him she was thinking of attending. “Especially now.” For Miles, watching Jude agonize and justify and wring her hands as if in a parody of anxiety, the situation was uncomplicated. The thought of attending her mother’s play—“performance,” Jude prefers to call it, because Shakespeare wrote plays and her mother merely spews intimate confessions onto a stage—distressed her nearly to the point of incapacitation. Therefore, she should not go.

This straightforwardness in Miles was the first quality that attracted Jude and the one she most loved in him. She equated it with being neither an actor nor any other type of artist. He was the first person she’d known with any familiarity who wasn’t. It was like encountering rock when you’d only ever stood on shifting sand. Thank god, she’d said over and over in her head on the subway home from their first date.

“If you go,” Miles said, “I can’t go with you.”

“Maybe Papa can get out of—”

“Damn it, Jude. Damian shouldn’t be supporting this toxic cycle between you and your mother either. Are you forgetting what happened after your last run‑in with her?”

“I’m not going to fall apart. I’m ready.”

“You’re falling apart right now.”

“It’s fine. I’m just catastrophizing.”

“With all the traveling you’re having to do, everything that’s being asked of you—you’re stretched to the limit. You’re exhausted.”

He didn’t mention the other, bigger issue between them.

She was relieved when he wrapped his arms around her, sturdy arms more suited to a football player than an accountant. She leaned against his chest and looked over their apartment, dishes stacked neatly and drying on the drainer, the bedroom with its smooth white coverlet. The home and the security she’d built despite it all.

“You do know that normal people would just talk to each other,” he said. “Your mother puts on a play about your relationship and invites all of New York.”

“Performance,” she reminded him, stepping back so he could see on her face how wryly lighthearted she was, how shored up and not crumbling. How ready, at last, to face her mother.

...

The red velvet seats are worn through in places to ladders of white thread. As Jude lowers herself onto the edge of 3E, she takes some petty satisfaction in seeing Sadie reduced to performing in genteel shabbiness. She tucks her purse onto 3F and presses her fingernails into the backs of her knees until she feels the dig of ten stinging impressions in her skin. She is so perilously, unnecessarily close to the stage.

The auditorium is almost at capacity, the empty seat next to her a gap in a full set of teeth. She forces away a pang of conscience. She could turn in the extra ticket at the box office, but she wants—craves—requires—the empty seat, a buffer between herself and her mother’s fans. Even if the blank expanse beside her only makes her more conspicuous, she needs space to breathe.

She should not be here without Miles or her father. A supportive hand pressed into hers on the armrest, a shared eye roll when she needs it. She half rises to leave, the folding seat catching at the backs of her knees.

From the aisle a...

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Verlag
Dutton
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593473728
ISBN 13 
9780593473726
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
Deutschland

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