Mary Rose MacKinnon (AKA "MR", AKA "Mister"), is a semi-retired YA author of two successful novels (which everyone -- her fawning fanbase, her wife, and her parents -- assume will eventually become a trilogy), who is raising two small children in a shabby-but-gentrifying, downtown Toronto neighbourhood. Having put her writing on hold in order to assume the role of stay-at-home-Mumma, Adult Onset chronicles one week in Mary Rose's life; a week in which her wife, Hilary, is away directing a play in Calgary (or is that Winnipeg?); a week in which the stress of parenting reawakens childhood memories that express themselves in real and phantom pain for Mary Rose.
I found the beginning of Adult Onset to be confusing (ie, why her father addressed Mary Rose as "Mister" in an email isn't explained for a long time, and for that matter, neither is the true significance of that email explained until the very end of the book), and slightly off-putting as Mary Rose repeatedly made clear her lefty-liberal-Toronto politics (despising the current "fascist" Prime Minister -- who, by the way, was our leader when Canada legalised gay marriage -- or wondering if it's alright to buy organic tomatoes from Israel -- and, besides the fact that Israel is the only gay-friendly country in the Middle East, how can someone who makes several doomsday references to Climate Change justify buying produce from anywhere on the other side of the world?), and there were statements that just made me scratch my head (Mary Rose was "air chilling" her chicken in the fridge? Do people do this? As my husband was in the poultry -- air chilling -- business for twenty years, he confirmed what a useless enterprise that would be. MR also referred to someone as "a math teacher in Kitchener-Waterloo", and as this is my neighbourhood, I can confirm that no one would say that -- folks are either from Kitchener or Waterloo; they may be twin cities, but they are separate cities), and Mary Rose constantly, inwardly, corrected people's grammar, and I came very close to abandoning this book -- but am very glad I didn't. (By the by, would an American author say that someone is from Minneapolis-St. Paul instead of from either Minneapolis or St. Paul?)
Like I said, Adult Onset is confusing in the beginning as Mary Rose circles around her childhood memories, trying to distinguish between what she actually remembers and what she simply remembers being told. Adding to the confusion are conversations with MR's mother, whose incipient dementia is causing her to forget or contradict her daughter's memories and to loop and reloop back to familiar family lore (wherein miscarriages and infant deaths have been reduced to amusing anecdotes). The cooking and shopping and toddler temper tantrums of Mary Rose's current life are spliced with her own memories, with a third-person-omniscient view of her mother's experiences during MR's childhood, and with excerpts from her two YA novels (which is a lovely and clever trick to expose MR's subconscious). Being prone to panic attacks, Mary Rose often feels like she's outside of herself -- watching the performance of a happy life without having access to its joys -- and when her two-year-old daughter's tantrums become too severe, MR is quick to anger, and fears that she might be capable of involuntarily hurting her kids.
This notion of the ways in which parents (voluntarily or not) hurt their kids becomes the ultimate point of Adult Onset, and while I sometimes felt frustrated along the way, I was in tears by the end and couldn't regret the journey that brought me there. According to this interview, this is the most autobiographical book Ann-Marie MacDonald has written (and it specifically mentions that some of the worst things that Mary Rose's mother said to her actually were said to MacDonald), so it's tempting to assume that this is more memoir than fiction. Obviously, I don't know Ann-Marie MacDonald and have no business trying to make assumptions about her process, but it feels like the best parts of Adult Onset were based on real events and the clunky parts were in the storifying -- like as though, perhaps, MacDonald was still too close to the pain to create authorial distance. I would give this 3.5 stars if I could but will happily round up to four.
Everyone knows that it is better not to abuse their children; that it is worth everything to change the habits that perpetuate abuse. The world depends on it. But Mary Rose has discovered the hidden cost. It is so steep as to bankrupt the best intentions, and the worst part is that payment is due the moment that change is named. This is because to enact the change is to experience by contrast the shocking nature of what preceded it. It is to de-normalize violence; unwrap it like a dangerous gift and see it glowing, hear it blaring like a siren, feel it beating like a heart. For Mary Rose, it means betraying her own mother by mothering differently. Better.
I tried to take it easy on Ann-Marie MacDonald in the main review because I wouldn't want to turn off any readers over on goodreads -- what this book says about pain and forgiveness is really powerful in the end -- but so many things turned me off. More examples: when Mary Rose is told that the pain in her arm isn't cancer, she's so happy that "she would fistpump if it wouldn't make her look American". That's a 1990's level of anti-American childishness that I thought went out the door with Carolyn Parrish stomping on the George Bush doll:
I thought that only Margaret Atwood was still carrying that torch -- as when she went ballistic when she believed a satirical report that Sun News was to name itself Fox News North -- and just when I was thinking about Atwood, Mary Rose sees her drive by in a car; the subtext becomes overt; we are literally exploring Atwood's neighbourhood in Adult Onset.
Mary Rose owns a pitbull and has many opportunities to decry Ontario's ban on the breed, but bizarrely, MacDonald has this dog (maybe) attack a Postal Worker (she didn't actually witness the event) and uses this incident to further demonstrate the unfair image that pitbulls have. That's a hard argument to make when this dog is admittedly aggressive -- a friend can't bring her own dog to visit because Daisy would eat her -- so it's just one more viewpoint that MacDonald is daring the reader to challenge.
And here's another head-scratcher:
At the kitchen table, Sue, Saleema and Gigi sit intently, each bent over a hand of cards. Gigi is teaching them to play poker. They grunt in greeting like a trio of 1960s husbands as Mary Rose enters the kitchen with a cheery, "I'm back", proving once again that gender is a construct.
I know this whole "gender is a construct" idea is the latest salvo of the bien-pensants, but I don't see how women playing poker "proves" anything.
I don't know if I was clear in my review about what I meant by "authorial distance", but this is an example -- Mary Rose gave her son a glass unicorn that plays Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, and every night, she winds it up while tucking Matthew in. One day, she finds the head broken off, assumes it was the 2-year-old Maggie who broke it, and lovingly repaired it for her son. Later, she finds the unicorn in Maggie's room and Matthew says that he gave it to her; he never liked the song. At a different point in the book, Mary Rose's brother called her from his cell -- he had been having a panic attack while driving and pulled over to hear her voice. Since the two of them were united as children (as the two survivors of their mother's string of miscarriages and post-partum depression), MR knew what song to sing (Boom Boom, Ain't it Great to be Crazy?), but he says, "No, the other one", and he felt better by the time she got to the part where all the soldiers go away. That's obviously also Where Have All The Flowers Gone? (to anyone who knows the song), so there must be real significance to it. Where "authorial distance" (and I'm afraid I may have made up that term) comes into play is that Ann-Marie MacDonald might have a song like this that serves as a shield for her and her brother -- she may even have bought a music box for her son and had him reject it -- this feels like a very true story but as it isn't fully developed for the reader, perhaps it made more sense to the author; perhaps she thinks she explained it well enough because the rest of it is still in her mind. This is the vibe that I found so confusing at first: MacDonald may have thought she was providing enough information as she went along because she wasn't straight inventing and the world was complete in her own mind.
But again, despite my confusion and the lefty-liberal-Atwood's-Toronto political overlay, when Adult Onset is telling its story, it's a very powerful book and I hope it finds its audience.
