The school’s metrics for success are clinical and data-reliant, misguided attempts at pinpointing the mechanics of maternal love. She swears she never meant to be out that long. And then, while she’s there, why not quickly catch up on some work? When she gets the call from the officers, it’s two and a half hours since she left. And then, since she’s out, she runs to the office to grab an important file. Who wouldn’t crack? But Frida has messed up in a big way: Functioning on little sleep and late on a deadline, she decides to leave Harriet home alone, happily strapped into a bouncer, while she runs out to get coffee. It’s the end of a chain of things gone very wrong, from Harriet’s birth (a traumatic emergency C-section) to her husband leaving her for another woman (three months post-partum) to trying to manage a toddler as an unexpectedly single working mom, in a city she only moved to for her (now) ex. It forces the reader to contend with an uncomfortable question: If the state were to quantify what it means to be a good mother, would I pass the test? Frida Liu, our doomed protagonist, fails miserably.įrida is a 39-year-old Chinese-American mother and writer, and when we meet her, the police are calling to tell her they have her 18-month-old daughter, Harriet, in their custody.
Susanna home alone 4 series#
These are the moments that ran through my mind while reading Jessamine Chan’s excellent, provocative debut novel, The School for Good Mothers (the January Today show Book C lub pick, which is being made into a television series by Jessica Chastain’s production company). There was the raised voice at the playground, the dinnertime bribery, the countless times I’ve sat at the kitchen table on my laptop while he asked, with a lisp so sweet it’s almost too on the nose, “Can you play with me, pleathe?” There was the time I turned on the YouTube app, plopped him in front of the television, and stopped paying attention long enough for the algorithm to find a nightmarish CGI car crash simulator. There was the morning I took the garbage out and didn’t rush back inside, instead enjoying a beat of quiet solitude while my 2-year-old son sat alone in the living room.
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