Women’s Prize longlist 5/16
Alicia Elliott’s And Then She Fell is another book from the WP longlist with a motherhood focus, which is not my type currently but I did know in advance this time, which helped. The story addresses post-partum mental health, but its richness in theme doesn’t stop there.
Our MC is a new mother to a 6 week-old and struggling to build a rapport with the baby; she’s also grieving the recent loss of her own mother, whose death she blames herself for. In spare moments, she works at writing out the Creation Story her Mohawk tribe believes in, using a fresh, personal and irreverent voice, juggling doubts about her storytelling and fears that everyone around her is conspiring against her. It’s a brilliant pairing of real Native concerns in the modern world and magical realism related to a psychotic break; as the paranoia reflects real prejudices recognizable in today’s society and the magic highlights Native beliefs, there does come a masterfully constructed point where both narrator and reader are left wondering where to find the line between the real and the imagined- and whether imagined threats are any less real after all.
I did struggle with the irreverence of the story’s tone at times, despite appreciating the points that telling a traditional story in an untraditional way is no less valid, and that adaptation can be the key to keeping traditions alive in a changing world. Magical realism is also something I tend to struggle with, and this book was no exception; it started pretty rocky for me here with a cartoon breaking character on screen to impart wisdom/advice, but further instances felt less silly. Any issues I had with tone and genre are a reflection of my own reading tastes, not indicative of any flaw in Elliott’s writing, which deftly weaves together each thread of this multi-layered tapestry.
I particularly enjoyed the commentary on Native culture and the navigation of rampant racism, and felt the MC’s imposter syndrome with her writing hit close to home- though of course my own stakes differ and feel much less significant in comparison, many of the doubts and affirmations represented here felt very translatable across circumstances without ever detracting from the uniqueness of the MC’s own particular perspective.
Although I didn’t always feel like the right audience for this book, I am glad I read it and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to the right reader- perhaps someone interested in reading about motherhood, the process of making art, and deepening one’s cultural understanding. I do think it’s a good fit for the WP this year.
“Mohawk feels like a weapon coming from Steve’s lips- not because he’s necessarily wielding it that way but because history is. Here was the language I had lost, the language my parents and aunts and half my grandparents had lost, which was so different from the English that’d been forced on us that I secretly worried my tongue would never be able to make those sounds. And here was Steve, rattling it off easily, as if it weren’t an endangered language, my endangered language; as if those words, which held my culture, were simply…words to him.”
My reaction: 3 out of 5 stars. I was eager to check this one out because Elliott’s previous publication, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, caught my attention a few years ago but I’ve yet to pick it up; luckily, though And Then She Fell wasn’t a perfect fit for me personally, I appreciated the writing and themes enough here that I am still interested in checking out more work from Elliott. I’m not sure I would’ve ever picked up And Then She Fell on my own, but aside from some initial hesitation I got along with it better than I expected to.