My Mother's Lovers

An artist and a bookstore owner, the narrator's parents in My Mother's Lovers are known in their small town as "those hippies in the purple house." Mimi, the central figure in her daughter Lake's life, is the mother many of us would love to have yet would resent bitterly until we came to understand her. Looking back through a child's observant yet uncomprehending eyes, Lake describes how she was charmed and mystified by Mimi as a young child, then grew to resent her mother's hunger for passion and authenticity, which she experienced as betrayal. Complex and intriguing characters move in and out of Lake's life, such as GraceAnne, a native American hair dresser whose silence invites her customers to confide the bizarre stories of their lives, or Aunt Dee Dee, a would-be Princess who swoops into town bearing clothes, Barbies, and the family's first telephone. Many of these characters, including Mimi herself, have secrets that were not open for young Lake to read, so the adult Lake periodically builds on her childhood memories to imagine for herself their thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Those passages are the most evocative and beautiful in the book. In particular, if you haven't already been captivated by Passanante's poetic, humorous, and visually gorgeous style by the time you reach the sensuous interlude of Mimi and her scarred logger, you will surrender to Passanante then.My Mother's Lovers is a short novel that compresses in its humorous, tragic, and gorgeous pages the timeless story of a girl's coming of age, her achievement of a hard won wisdom. Love is also the book's subject; there is not one false moment, no cliche, in Passanante's wise and deeply observed treatment of literature's most common theme.

Passanante's book grabbed me in the first chapter, and I never let go. Her descriptions of a child born to flower-children of the 60's in Idaho resonates in an almost magical way. The trials and tribulations of adolescence for the main character are incredibly vivid, painful and surprising. The book is fast moving, thought provoking and wonderfully written.

It's been over a month since I read it, and I can't get it out of my mind--its authentic characters (from Lake, the furious daughter of two leftover hippies to Aunt DeeDee, her mother's super-conventional, miniature, spike-heel-wearing sister, whom Lake longs to live with in "Frisco," to GranVinny, the gruff, flower-loving grandfather Lake has been separated from--along with a gallery of small-town Idaho loggers and hairdressers), its wit (Aunt DeeDee's personal-ads beaux usually "nicked themselves shaving and still had a bit of Kleenex encrusted on a thin red line on his neck"), and especially its haunting theme, of the complex ways in which emotional legacies are passed through generations. Builds to a satisfying, surprising, funny/appalling climax--a unique chase scene that I'd love to see in a movie!

There are times when you pick up a book that you feel you really connect with the author, that somehow you know her and the people about whom she writes. For me, "My Mother's Lovers" was one of those books.While this is clearly a book of fiction, the vivid description of the characters, particularly the grandfather, resonated with me. I always enjoy books about young people coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps because even at 49 I'm still coming of age. (Or, so I dream.)This is also a book about a mix of cultures, Italian and Jewish, and about hippies and what used to be the establishment (which so many of the hippies have since become).I look forward to Passanante's next book.