Book Club

We will be discussing Ilana Masad’s All My Mother’s Lovers

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SYNOPSIS

After Maggie Krause’s mother dies suddenly in a car crash, Maggie finds five sealed envelopes with her will, each addressed to a mysterious man she’s 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. Now in her late twenties, Maggie is finally in something resembling a serious relationship, wondering if some of whatever shaped her parents’ decades-long love story might exist after all.

Overwhelmed by her grief and frustrated with her family, Maggie decides to escape the shiva and hand-deliver her mother’s letters. The ensuing road trip takes her over miles of California highways, through strangers’ recollections of a second, hidden life (that seems almost impossible to reconcile with the Iris she knew), and a journey through her own fears as she navigates her new relationship. As she fills in the details of Iris’s story, Maggie must confront the possibility that almost everything she knew about her mother — her marriage, her lukewarm relationship to Judaism, her disapproval of her daughter’s queerness — is more meaningful than she ever allowed herself to imagine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ilana Masad is a fiction writer, essayist, and book critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review,
NPR, BuzzFeed, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as several others. All My Mother’s Lovers is Masad’s debut novel.

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