[The first photo is of a smouldering rose; the second is of two hands captured from above, lighting a piece of paper on fire; and in the third, a hand holds a slowly burning leaf.]
Still social distance, still trying to take advantage of the blogging and reading time. Also trying to adjust to working from home which is somehow incredibly productive and incredibly lazy all at the same time? I hope everyone is staying safe, trying to manage their anxiety during this crisis, and trying to find moments of creativity and joy.
- Why did I pick this book up?
I had heard good things about this book. I can’t quite remember from where. In January, to prepare for the New Year, I did some research and wrote down a massive list of books I want to try and read. Some of it came from friends’ social media, some from random lists, and some from award lists. I am good at doing the research, but not so good at remembering the specifics; so I know that somehow this book wound up on my list. I also wanted to push myself to read books by authors I hadn’t read before, and having not read Celeste Ng’s debut novel, she fell into that category. Reese Witherspoon also said it made her cry, and Jodi Picoult loved it. Also a NYT Best Seller and with a jacket that stated “Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster” I was definitely intrigued.
- Would I recommend why/why not?
This book was a solid read. Nothing mind blowing; I didn’t cry like Reese Witherspoon, and I didn’t read it in a single setting like Jodi Picoult. But I did find Ng to be a good writer, perfectly serviceable, and her characters were interesting, if a bit reliant on stereotypes and character foils.
It is also a book that is mostly focused on the theme of motherhood, and seems to say contradictory things about family and what makes someone a parent. So I can’t tell how I feel about it totally. However, if you are someone who has children, and understands what that love truly feels like, this book may be more moving than it was to me.
But I would recommend this book if you like reading about seemingly perfect and normal suburban families. There was some interesting stuff about how people have a hard time accepting difference and diversity in their communities, even if that diversity is of opinion and lifestyle, and even if that community paints itself as being progressive.
I wouldn’t recommend this book if you hate books about artists (that would be a weird sort of category, but I once heard someone tell me they hated anything that wasn’t “masculine urban literature” because they couldn’t relate, which could be unpacked further but you get it, that guy was a douche) or stories told from multiple perspectives.
If you are in the mood for some late 90s early 2000s nostalgia vibes, this book is a good read; although I am a bit younger than the children in these books would be, I could definitely fondly recognize a lot of cultural moments as belonging to that idyllic pre-9/11 and now pre-Trump era.
- Quick Synopsis **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:
As this story is told through many points of view, there are a lot of narrative arcs – I won’t go over them all. However, the most important part of the story is that this is about the collision of two families: the idyllic, cookie-cutter Richardson family (mom: Elena; dad: unimportant; children: Lexie, the eldest- Trip, the popular jock- Moody, the sensitive youngest son- and Izzy, the hard to manage daughter of fourteen), and the nomadic Warrens (composed of just artist mom Mia and daughter Pearl).
The story opens with the Richardson’s house burning to the ground, and the suspect, it seems, is Izzy. “How did we get here?” is essentially what the first chapter asks. So we then go back in time to earlier in the year, when Mia and Pearl arrive in Shaker Heights and start renting a small house from the Richardsons. Pearl and Moody immediately become fast friends and Pearl wants to spend all her time in the Richardson’s home which represents everything she is not used to: wealth, stability, routine, and parents who have ‘normal’ jobs. While Pearl is becoming more ensconced in the Richardson household, Izzy is drawn to Mia and her artistic spirit, quickly becoming her friend and assistant of sorts. While working at a Chinese restaurant, Mia meets Bebe, a young immigrant woman who eventually explains that she recently abandoned her baby on the steps of a firehouse as a result of poverty and disenfranchisement as a lonely immigrant. At the same time, we see that one of Elena’s friends, Linda McCullough, is in the process of adopting a baby with her husband. A baby that was found on the steps of a firehouse.
What ensues is a bitter custody battle between the McCullough’s and Bebe, a battle that exposes the white privilege and racism that prop up Shaker Heights. And what the custody battle also brings into question is the meaning of motherhood. Who gets to pick who is a parent and why? Is love enough?
Of course this custody battle pits the Richardsons against Mia Warren, as she sides with Bebe and even helps convince her that she deserves to pursue her maternal rights. In an effort to find something to discredit Bebe, Elena decides to dig up dirt on Mia. The justification isn’t actually sound, but it is obvious that Elena resents Mia for representing what she is not, what she maybe didn’t even know she could be of, and this is her reason for getting personal. We find out that no one knows anything about Pearl’s dad or Mia’s past in any great detail. Elena thinks it is hiding some sort of acrimonious past, or unwanted pregnancy.
In the meantime, Lexie gets pregnant by her highschool boyfriend, and gets an abortion with Pearl’s help, under Pearl’s name. Pearl starts having sex with Trip, hiding it from Moody who is obviously in love with her. DRAAAAMAAAA!
We the reader then discover everything about Mia’s past that Elena has been trying to figure out; Mia went to art school, was on track to be a famous photographer, but was broke as a joke. She is approached by some man who asks if she will be a surrogate for him and his wife. She agrees. She is heavily pregnant when her younger brother dies in a car accident. She shows up back home for the funeral without having given her parents any warning. They lose it, think she is essentially a prostitute, and are not reassured in the least when she essentially tells them she is selling her baby to a childless couple. After being disowned by her family, Mia feels so alone that she decides she is going to keep the baby, and run away. This is how Mia’s nomadic lifestyle begins. It is an interesting backstory, but also not quite as interesting or impactful as I expected it to be based on the buildup.
Eventually, Elena decides to see if Bebe has had an abortion, in a way to make her seem like even more of an unfit mother. Instead, she ‘discovers’ that ‘Pearl’ has had an abortion (it’s Lexie, but Elena doesn’t know this) and assumes that Pearl has been having sex with Moody (she guesses the wrong son, lol). She decides to confront Mia and use this information to blackmail Mia into leaving town with Pearl, in the hopes of ending Pearl’s relationship with her son. At the same time, a judge grants custody of the baby to the McCulloughs, siding with upright normative society, instead of with the marginalized mother. Bebe then kidnaps the baby and runs away to China, in a kind of commentary on motherhood and who has a right to a child? The message to me is a bit muddied, or maybe I just disagree with it? I’m not pro taking a woman’s baby – not one like Bebe in particular – but I’m also not of the mind that a biological bond is the most important thing. Adoption is fine and in a lot of circumstances, is the best option.
Mia and Pearl get ready to leave as Mia finally tells Pearl the truth about her past. After they leave, Izzy is heartbroken to discover they have left her, and feels betrayed by her entire family, viewing them as the cause for the Warren’s departure. She sets their house on fire. She literally burns it to the ground. It’s brief, but definitely the most badass moment of the book. She then leaves home, at the age of fifteen, to maybe link up with Mia and Pearl? This is of course her intent, but this is where the book ends, so we don’t know what happens to Izzy.
- Overall brain gushings :
I really enjoyed the parts of this book that described Mia’s artistic process, and all the ways in which photography can be manipulated. That was really educational, and the writing was always very crisp and vivid when discussing these moments.
I also loved the theme of not-belonging. Although Pearl wants nothing more than to belong, Mia is comfortable not-belonging and in fact seeks it out. I liked the viewpoint that to be conventional is not for everyone, and that not everyone’s lives and desires match up with other’s views of success and happiness. I grew up in a pretty nomadic family, and although there were times I craved stability like Pearl, in the end, I am incredibly grateful for this facet of my life, and there is nothing in me that envies the ‘perfect’ life of Elena Richardson.
I also really enjoyed reading about Izzy not-belonging to her family, and finding her belonging in other non-belongers. It was also nice to read about friendships and mentorships between teenagers and adults, as I find this is something that is not encouraged enough in society.
- What does it mean?
Little Fires Everywhere is super concerned with the pull of being a mother. In this book, we see many women and the various ways in which they are pulled to motherhood. There isn’t a single character that isn’t pulled to it: even Lexie, who gets an abortion, seriously contemplates keeping it, and is clearly baby-crazy. Which is fine. But again, not a single woman is down to be childless. And also other than Mia’s photography mentor, there isn’t a single character that isn’t heterosexual. So that’s usually something that will bum me out, especially in conversations about parenthood.
The book also strives to expose the ways in which we can lie to ourselves about our own lives; we tell ourselves we are happy with our decisions, that we are powerless to control our lives, that we deserve certain things and not others, and that all these assumptions and lies stop us from living truly full lives.
Celeste Ng wants readers to see that imposing our belief systems and values onto other people’s lives and judging them to be lacking merely reflects our own shortcomings. We become blind to our selves and distort the reality of who and what people are. Elena Richardson has assumed all the wrongs things about Mia, and the lies she tells herself about the Warren family end up destroying her own family. And the saddest part? Elena is too focused on her own idea of success and happiness to realize that she is making some serious mistakes with regard to her family’s and her own happiness. Mia and Pearl, a little battered and bruised, will go on as they always have, and it is the Richardson’s who will be forever changed. And probably not for the better. The children are definitely traumatized, betrayed, and that’s not even counting the whole Izzy running away thing.
- Favourite passages :
Although I am not a parent, I could really identify with this following passage, as someone who moved far away from her family right our of high school, I feel like I have had to wean myself from certain gestures of affection.
Now, as a teenager, Pearl’s caresses had become rare – a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug – and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia though to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.
Ng, pg 248-249.
This passage demonstrates Elena’s black and white thinking, and shows how this thinking can be dangerous and counterproductive to happiness and fulfilment. Here, Elena’s husband ponders the situation between Bebe and the McCullough’s:
For her [Elena] it was simple: Bebe Chow had been a poor mother; Linda McCullough had been a good one. One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on. He had always admired his wife’s idealism, her belief that the world could be made better, could be made orderly, could perhaps even be made perfect. For the first time, he wondered if the same held true for him.
pg 269.
- If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :
Before I get to my book recommendations, I wanted to mention as a random aside (and couldn’t find anywhere else to mention it, aka I forgot until now) that this book is being turned into a TV show? Has been turned into a TV show? And get this Reese Witherspoon (who if you forgot, said this book ‘made her cry’) is playing Elena Richardson! Which is pretty good and obvious type-casting, but also funny to me the Reese would read this book, and then want to be Elena! Anyways, I may actually consider watching it, because I am intrigued to see how they adapt this novel.
The most obvious recommendation would be a book I reviewed a few months ago, Harmony, which is a great story about raising difficult children and family dynamics in crisis.
Another amazing book about motherhood is Louise Erdrich’s The Bluejay’s Dance which is her non-fiction recounting of being pregnant and the beginnings of motherhood.
If you want to read a really thoughtful and critical book about motherhood and the ways in which society pressures women to fit into the role of mother, read Motherhood by Sheila Heti. It is an excellent book that is essentially a collection of essays that charts Heti’s changing thoughts on motherhood and femininity and she really articulates a lot of problems that I have navigating society’s expectations of me as a woman who likes kids, but doesn’t really want any.
Stay tuned for my next review; we are back to some great Can Lit with Megan Gail Coles’ amazing, heart-wrenching Newfoundland Gothic novel Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club. It’s a long title, but if a book’s worth was determined by length of title, I wouldn’t take away a single word.
It's Lit Fam! 