Adult onset, by Ann-Marie Macdonald

Mary Rose MacKinnon is a 48 year old who has two children with her wife, Hilary.  Matthew, 6, is adopted, and his younger sister Maggie, who is 2, was born to Hilary, the younger of the couple, on their last chance to conceive.  Mary Rose (also known as “Mister” after her initials) has written two successful young adult novels, but has taken a break from starting the final book in the trilogy to stay home with the children while Hilary works.  It is a stereotypically domestic life that Mary Rose had never imagined during her younger, wilder years.  During a week-long period while Hilary is out of town working on a play, Mary Rose begins to confront some of her own history as she struggles to be a loving parent, particularly to Maggie, a willful child like most two year olds.  Her father was a Canadian military man and the family moved frequently, including a stint in Germany. Her mother, Dolly, the last of twelve children born to a Lebanese mother who married at thirteen, has only had three children – she feels that she “is not good at making babies.”  Mary Rose is the middle child, but there are other children born between her older sister Maureen and younger brother Andrew Patrick.  She is named after the “first” Mary Rose, who was stillborn and therefore not buried in the Church.  A son named Alexander lives long enough to be baptized and is buried.  These losses, and other miscarriages, were caused by Rh factor, but that is of little consolation to Dolly, who retreats into depression and turns away from Mary Rose after she is born.  Mary Rose also bears the scars of two surgeries done before she was fourteen for bone cysts on her upper arm which cause it to be easily broken.  Add to this her parents’ inability for many years to accept her “lifestyle” which they feel she has “chosen,” and it isn’t hard to understand why being a parent herself is hard for her.  But despite this rather grim outline and the serious treatment of post-partum depression, child abuse, and the difficulties of coming out as a lesbian, much of the book is a dead-on and often funny depiction of life sandwiched between small children and elderly parents.  A complex and multi-layered book that has the feel of autobiography even if it isn’t.  I recommend it highly.  381 pp.