THE FASHION ORPHANS, a sweet and poignant story of sisterhood that's about malignant motherhood instead

THE FASHION ORPHANS
RANDY SUSAN MEYERS & M.J. ROSE
Blue Box Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Two estranged sisters find that forgiveness never goes out of style when they inherit their mother’s vintage jackets, purses… and pearls of wisdom

Estranged half-sisters Gabrielle Winslow and Lulu Quattro have only two things in common: mounds of debt and coils of unresolved enmity toward Bette Bradford, their controlling and imperious recently deceased mother.

Gabrielle, the firstborn, was raised in relative luxury on Manhattan’s rarefied Upper East Side. Now, at fifty-five, her life as a Broadway costume designer married to a heralded Broadway producer has exploded in divorce.

Lulu, who spent half her childhood under the tutelage of her working-class Brooklyn grandparents, is a grieving widow at forty-eight. With her two sons grown, her life feels reduced to her work at the Ditmas Park bakery owned by her late husband’s family.

The two sisters arrive for the reading of their mother’s will, expecting to divide a sizable inheritance, pay off their debts, and then again turn their backs on each other.

But to their shock, what they have been left is their mother’s secret walk-in closet jammed with high-end current and vintage designer clothes and accessories— most from Chanel.

Contemplating the scale of their mother’s self-indulgence, the sisters can’t help but wonder if Lauren Weisberger had it wrong: because it seems, in fact, that the devil wore Chanel. But as they being to explore their mother’s collection, meet and fall in love with her group of warm, wonderful friends, and magically find inspiring messages tucked away in her treasures — it seems as though their mother is advising Lulu and Gabrielle from the beyond — helping them rediscover themselves and restore their relationship with each other.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I have a personal connection to this story, in that this could be my family. My sisters are a lot older than me, and our mother was the same kind of borderline personality that the dead woman was. After our mother's death, there wasn't anything left except stuff...lots and lots of stuff...and there's a long, long history of unkindness, rancor, and just plain nastiness all over our "family." I was very curious to see how things would play out fictionally.

It's not like I wasn't expecting the happily ever after...I was...but I was simultaneously frustrated and amused at how these deeply estranged siblings navigated this emotional passage without either death threats or theft taking place.

What drew me to the read was that sense of familiarity, of fellow feeling, for the characters. It was a fun way to work through my own bad past. And in the end, while I wanted the story to end the way it did, I was...curiously detached. Neither Lulu nor Gabrielle ever cohered to me, never took on the full volume of characterhood. The real character here was their horrible mother! She emerged in all her shallow, self-centered, controlling awfulness. If you've never seen The Little Mermaid, you won't know this reference, but this old baggage out-Ursula'd Ursula!

I was drawn in by the deep Chanel lore on display here, and found myself grateful for the Fire tablet's ability to browse the web. There's a lot I didn't know, and a lot I half-knew, about Chanel, so being able to check references and to see aesthetics I was ignorant about helped me to *get* this read. The sisters "playing dress-up" in Mama's clothes was a hoot. But in the end, that's just what it felt like: Playing a game in which Mama would, in the end, step in to decide who wins. (Or her lawyer, in this case, who must approve any plan for the huge collection of Chanel artifacts to be disposed of.)

So there's me, all irked with "Mother" Bette being her borderline-personality tantrummy self...there's the source of my sour, not-quite-four star rating. I was certainly drawn in by the collaborators' ability to merge their prose into one authorial voice. It shows that they're different people mostly in the hilarious older women who formed Bette's coterie of ladies-who-lunch, and Lulu's adult sons. These very, very different types didn't emerge from one brain! But they each contributed to the sense of rightness and reality that the story definitely has.

The obvious comparables to this story are Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada (actually, Author Weisberger, she wore and collected Chanel), but those aren't direct cognates. Bushnell's book and its offshoots are about navigating complications unique to upper-class modern life; Weisberger's bildungsroman takes a greenhorn into adulthood wearing amazing shoes. Here we have what happens when the Bushnell women, now mothers of another Weisberger generation, have to deal with their own mothers' deaths.

It *is* in a tradition, then, but it is *not* something you've read a dozen times already. It's the next step, it's the Bushnell women's ascent to cronehood, it's the education of the adults in the arts of being elders. It works fine. It isn't quite as full-bodied as I expected it to be, since the real main character turns out to be the dead mother; but it was more than worth my time to read. I'll venture to say that it's worth yours, too.

YOU EXIST TOO MUCH, Queer Palestinian girl finds out how her world works...then says "BYE NOW"

YOU EXIST TOO MUCH
ZAINA ARAFAT
Catapult
$26.00 hardcover, available now

WINNER OF THE 33rd Lambda Literary Award—BEST BISEXUAL FICTION!

Rating: 6* of five

The Publisher Says: On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-year-old Palestinian American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the United States and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine—Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings—for love and a place to call home.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The frustrations of being Othered by virtue of being your own self are not fresh ground to till. Eternally fertile ground growing evergreen crops, though not fresh. I read this book twice and that is a rare occurrence for me, at my age and with my TBR approaching mid-four figures. The reason I decided that I needed a second trip through the book was simple: I was so completely shattered by the honest and vulnerable story Author Arafat tells, a story that could with only minor tweaks be my own, that I didn't trust my opinion-forming ability. I was too close, too in the moment, to feel remotely analytical.

Start with the beginning, an anecdote from the US-raised narrator's childhood visit to her "homeland":

It occurred to me in that moment to question why, as a man, his bare legs were somehow less troubling than mine. It was a double standard, a shame I had simply accepted until then. I must've done something wrong. In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.

As though a young girl's walking apparatus could somehow be unacceptable! "Haram" or "forbidden" the old religious nuts shout at her. Among the many, many reasons I find religions and religious beliefs offensive in the extreme is the insanity of accepting that your being, whatever part of it the religious don't happen to like, is unacceptable, nay offensive, to the god they claim made you. But Author Arafat reclaims the space:

Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space.

I don't inhabit an ambiguous space, being bearded and so American in appearance that, in other countries, American tourists glom onto me for help dealing with the foreignness of their presence in wherever. But there's that inner thing, the queerness, that never, ever quite stays unnoticed. And that is probably why Author Arafat notices with such keenness that her ability to get by with chicanery is such excellent camouflage. It becomes an addicition, in fact. It's easy for someone like me, who also had a borderline personality disordered mother, to relate to her need, her survival-level desire, to camouflage, hide, obfuscate, not say the truth:

I could think of nothing more shameful—why was I doing this to her? At the time I thought the same thing: she should have had better. She didn't deserve this at all.
–and–
"I don't care what you choose to do anymore," she said, and I crumbled. I needed her to care. Worse than anger was indifference.

Didn't deserve what, having a queer child? She's the one who's fucked up for making it such a huge stinkin' deal. Mother Abu Sa'ab and her utter inability to see people not herself as real, fully formed human beings with valid needs. Her child's needs are only seen as demands on her, unfair unjust "what did I do to deserve this?!" impositions. Affection is a conditional gift, not a right...not even a privilege. So Laila Abu Sa'ab, beautiful mother of a plain daughter who is awkward, unpolished, generally not like her, sets the stage for innumerable false trails her (always unnamed, this is all first-person present tense narration so she doesn't need to identify herself) child will follow:

I imagined she was judging me in that moment. I'm familiar with that judgment, after years of anorexia. I was past it by then, but still, how could I eat something so unsexy as a cheeseburger in front of the sexiest woman in the universe?
–and–
I was in between post-anorexia plump and all-night double sets, with no snack breaks—what if she didn't like my body? My mother had recently impersonated me, puffing up her cheeks and holding out her arms beyond her stomach like an ape.

Ah, the addict's favorite crutch: "{object} won't love me if..." and then the spiral goes down from there. "My image is only safe when others are at a safe distance!" and the distance, unsurprisingly, never gets smaller so the isolation becomes unbearable and the addiction comes back and "{object} won't love me now!" lather rinse repeat. It's inevitable. A mother without compassion plus a nature unacceptable to her world (the world, if I'm honest) can't be expected to create any other kind of result.

Then her girlfriend, four years of wondering what the hell is going on inside her partner's head, takes advantage of the narrator's absence to do the stupid, unforgivable thing that almost everyone does: She snoops. Reads emails not meant for her eyes. Be careful, partners, about this behavior. If you discover things that hurt you, no one is to blame but you yourself. "It's better to know!" rises the cry...and I say, "you already knew or you wouldn't have snooped." Anna snoops. Anna finds a mountain of lying and cheating. Bad Anna.

The last line was the hardest to read, the one that made my throat burn: "Maybe one day you'll learn you can't treat people with such disregard. Even yourself."

I get why Anna wrote that, I really do, but that's the nastiest and most judgmental formulation of the truth she could've spun up. This is why the snooping behavior is so toxic. The self-righteousness of Being Right is insufferable and makes those addicts to it very unpleasant people. But the hurt Anna caused did catalyze the narrator to go on a search for help:

Google had informed me that a woman named Pia Mellody ... was the foremost expert on love addiction. She sounded like a character out of a self-help fairy tale; I pictured her with a tiara and a wand.

So did I. Not in a good way, either. These sorts of judgmental sunshine-enema-givers make me itch. "Love addiction"? Really. Addicted to the endorphin rush but short on follow-through, in my never-remotely-humble opinion. But off our narrator goes to this summer camp for the love-addicted. And runs smack into her anorexia anxiety:

I was too uncomfortable to eat, especially {burger buns} that looked like the cotton stuffing inside of furniture.

Why I throw the buns away and get real bread to put around my home-brought fast food burgers. This place is a sham, and the food is the first warning. But the twenty-eight days are crucial to getting to grips with the out-of-control anxiety the narrator suffers.

I don't want to spoiler the extremely moving ending. I don't think I can take you any farther into the text without running that risk. Suffice it to say that, for me, the beating heart of the book is anxiety and anger, an intergenerational gift from all the parts of the narrator's past from before she was born:

At the time I didn't realize what it was that separated the two sides of my family: that my paternal cousins did not live in the noisy neighborhood, go to the community pool, and wait to eat hummus sandwishes at home by choice.

What makes people from mismatched backgrounds think their marriages will work? Expectations unmet are more caustic than acid rain and do their damage just as devastatingly but far more quickly. Judgment is *lethal* to marital (any relationship, really) harmony and inevitable between the parties to an up/down marriage. And it is the gift that keeps on giving, passing to children and fucking them up royally. Add to this mental illness on one side, emotional deprivation and class consciousness on the other, and one gets this sad story of a woman facing the world with a raincoat and a butter knife when she needs a scuba suit and a spear-gun.

I was powerfully moved by this read. I identified with this young woman's pathology and her ancestry, although I'm not ethnically Arab or Palestinian or anything else the US looks down on. I totally understand misgendering and omitting details about one's significant others. Being situationally out, being "reserved" (the polite self-lie for "closeted"), being unable to see past the mountain of unworthy feelings that we stand under, behind, below.

She sought healing, our narrator did; I have as well; and I hope anyone who reads this book (I hope there will be many, many of you) can and will seek healing as well.