Yet differentiating these patterns in broad terms can help daughters recognize, understand, sort through, and ultimately begin to manage these very problematic and painful interactions. Yet, despite the broad strokes of this shared and painful experience, the pattern of connection—how the mother interacts with her daughter—varies significantly from one pair to another. The novel’s setup and accompanying journey are both absorbing, but they yield somewhat superficial discoveries about Iris. Masad’s novel oscillates back and forth between Maggie’s and Iris’s perspectives, jumping through five decades of Iris’s life and the 10 or so days in Maggie’s after Iris’s death. It is, alas, easier to recognize that you are playing the role of Cinderella (and it was an evil mom, not a stepmother until the Grimm Brothers cleaned up the tale) when you are living in the cellar and everyone knows your mother is a hag.

Now, I know she did what she felt like, without any thought of me, but I still hear her voice in my head especially when life gets difficult or I feel insecure. All My Mother’s Lovers is engaging, and confident, and often wry, but it unfortunately does not satisfyingly resolve the mysteries we readers want solved. Many daughters report that the pain of feeling responsible somehow—the belief that they “made’ their mothers react, or that they are unworthy—is as crippling as the lack of maternal love. From Iris’s vantage point, we see her as a young woman married to an abusive rabbi, as a happy new mother with her second husband, and Maggie’s father, Peter. 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).

Through Maggie’s thought processes, Masad successfully subverts readers’ expectations of her novel’s classic premise too. We meet the lovers of the title, but don’t ever understand many of the choices Iris makes while in their company. While these behaviors are hurtful, with therapy or intervention, many daughters report reconciliation in adulthood as well as understanding.

JBC’s print lit­er­ary jour­nal Paper Brigade pro­vides a 200-page snap­shot of the Jew­ish lit­er­ary land­scape in Amer­i­ca and abroad. Such is one of the most vital questions brought forth in Ilana Masad’s debut novel, All My Mother’s Lovers: Who are the people that made us, and how do they shape who we become? Untangling enmeshment—the term alone conveys the difficulty—is another road entirely because of the absence of boundaries. Flesh and blood, with richly lived experiences; not extras in the story of your life, or one-dimensional foils who materialized the day you were born.

In many ways, this is another form of the dismissive interaction although it presents very differently; the key link is that the controlling mother doesn’t acknowledge her daughter any more than the dismissive one does.

The premise should have worked in theory, but I felt like every time we switched POV, the pacing stopped abruptly. It dawns on Maggie that whatever else her mother was…Iris was strong, and her strength felt like a kind of protection between Maggie and the world, even long after moving out and having her own life.The lack of maternal warmth and validation warps their sense of self, makes them lack confidence in or be wary of close emotional connection, and shapes them in ways that are both seen and unseen. Relatedly, Maggie’s routine and the lingering focus on social media doesn’t add much other than contemporary texture.

A unique meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties and grief, and a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity, All My Mother's Lovers challenges us to question the nature of fulfilling relationships. The occasional overwritten or superfluous explanation demonstrate this tendency: “The food was delicious, piping hot, and best eaten when fresh,” or “he turns back to them and puts two fingers to his mouth, fluttering his tongue in between in the universal symbol for eating pussy,” for example. Lovers” can feel thin at times, though it’s a testament to Masad’s writing that I wanted more from the world she created: more depth to Iris’s letters, which read more like camp-pen-pal correspondence than confessions from the grave; and more dimension to Maggie’s dad, Peter, who spends most of the novel out of sorts, only to drop a bombshell at the end that feels pat and underexplored. In an effort to run from her own grief and discover the truth about Iris—who made no secret of her discomfort with her daughter's sexuality—Maggie embarks on a road trip, determined to hand-deliver the letters and find out what these men meant to her mother. Dismissive behavior, as reported by daughters, occurs across a spectrum, and can become combative if the mother actively and aggressively turns dismissal into rejection.The combative mother uses verbal and emotional abuse to “win” but can resort to physical force as well.