I am going to combine the Great American Novel series with an additional request for recommendations in the mommy lit genre that I received in the anonymous Q&A.
Jodi Picoult is insanely left-wing and has gotten even more so in the past decade. Twenty years ago, however, she was a decent mommy-lit author and her ideology didn’t get in the way of her writing that much. Picoult’s 2009 novel Nineteen Minutes is a masterpiece of the genre. It’s soppy, it’s sappy. It has themes of mother’s love, teenage deviousness, school shootings, and dysfunction in a small town. What’s not to like?
Mommy Lit is a multifaceted genre. It’s not all about mothers and children. Mothers are also wives, so a big part of the mommy lit genre consists of novels about the intricacies of marriage. A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick is set in 1907 and demonstrates that marriage is too complex ever to be pre-planned or controlled.
Another important part of mommy lit is a discussion of the different ways of being a woman. Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge depicts a coarse, unbending woman who is a small daily curse to everybody who knows her. It’s very well-written but it can be triggering if you have somebody like the perennially shitty Olive in your life. It is quite enlightening to see how many readers of this mega best-selling novel perceived Olive as a positive character deserving of compassion.
Readers of the mommy lit genre love novels about psychopathic or downright evil women. This kind of reading helps them get in touch with what psychoanalyst Carl Jung termed the Shadow. This is the compendium of all of our darkest characteristics that we try to keep in check in order to live a civilized life. The novel Jane Doe by Victoria Helen Stone is the perfect expression of this kind of writing. It’s main character is not remotely a mommy, but she’s devious and deadly effective. There are two major trends in American literature for women:
1. Concentrates on female characters who are aggressively self-infantilizing
2. Portrays women who are extremely effective and competent
Jane Doe belongs squarely in the second category. Female readers unexpectedly fell in love with Jane in the way similar to how they responded to Amy in Gone Girl. The extraordinary success of these novels demonstrates that women like to imagine themselves as efficient and organized. At the same time, it’s curious that the only kinds of women portrayed this way in American literature of recent decades are sociopaths and murderers. I find that this is one of the central conflicts in American literature today. Is it possible to be an organized, goal-oriented, and effective woman without being a total piece of shit? For now writers have not been able to imagine this kind of woman that would be driven by goodness. Good women in these novels are almost invariably childish, helpless, and clueless morons.
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