Mika is 35, single, broke, jobless, and quite comically woke. She can’t keep a job or a boyfriend and relies on her parents to pay the rent every time she’s fired from yet another badly paid gig. She’s stuck in eternal adolescence where having a good time means going to a costume party at a gay bar where “dudes dance in cages” and she can drink herself into a stupor.
Neither Mika nor the author who created her realize that Mika’s misery is the result of her worldview. She fails at building a life for herself because she’s convinced that she deserves a lifestyle of endless travel, undefined career achievements, rich boyfriends who’ll accept that “she’s just not ready yet” for marriage at the age of 35, and complete freedom from any obligation. Things don’t work like that, and spending your life in incessant prattle about “dead white men” and a lack of “inclusivity” that are somehow to blame for your failure to launch leads to penury and sadness.
There is one saving grace in Mika’s life. When she was 19, she gave birth to a baby girl whom she gave up for adoption. Mika loves the daughter she hasn’t seen in 16 years with luminous intensity. Neither the fact that the girl is a child of rape nor their lifelong separation diminish Mika’s conviction that Penny, her daughter, is what gives her life meaning. When Penny suddenly contacts Mika, this prompts the woman to realize how little she has to offer to a teenager. Penny has a lot to offer to the mother who abandoned her, however. As Mika finally allows herself to be a parent, she begins to figure out what matters and setting her life at least somewhat right. And since she finally starts to inscribe herself into the natural order, all sorts of unexpected gifts come her way.
Emiko Jean is not a great writer. Her grammar is deplorable, her writing style pre-adolescent, and her penchant for left-wing sloganeering tedious. But when she writes about a mother’s love for her child, there are glimmers of talent in her. She could develop into a good writer if she let her instinct, instead of her immature political leanings, guide her. One could argue, of course, that Jean is slathering on the slogans to hide the deeply pro-life message of her novel. I don’t believe that is the case but I wouldn’t place large bets against this possibility.
This is an airport read, so there’s a somewhat tortured sex scene and an implausible happy ending. But there are moments of beauty in the novel, such as when Mika tells her daughter, “My body had a purpose and it was you”, and that makes Mika in Real Life not a waste of time.
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