My Real Children, by Jo Walton

[rachelmanija]

I read this when it first came out; please correct and forgive inaccuracies of memory. (Appropriate to the story!)

Patricia, an Alzheimer's patient, is in a nursing home. The nurses think that she recalls living two completely different lives (and is slipping between realities now) because she has dementia; we, the readers, know that she's recalling alternate timelines.

In 1949, she agreed to a marriage proposal, or not. The woman who agreed became Trish, trapped in a miserably abusive marriage... but also living in the best possible world as far as the general good is concerned, with peace, prosperity, and a moon base. The woman who declined became Pat, who falls in love with a woman, travels, and has a life full of love and self-fulfillment... in a world that slides into nightmarish total war, and seems to headed straight for Armageddon.

Though there are plenty of full scenes with dialogue and so forth, there's also a lot of summary narration. This works surprisingly well; my interest only flagged in the last fifth or so, when I started losing track of the multiplicity of alternate children and grandchildren and their significant others. It's a book about two largely mundane lives that inexplicably has the narrative grip of a thriller. I credit Walton's writing skill for this, and I'm still not sure how she did it. Between the depressingness and the summarizing, by all rights I should have bounced off this book rather than reading it in a day.

I didn't write about the book till now because I had such mixed feelings about it. Artistically, it's very well-done - an unusual use of tell-not-show that succeeds in (mostly) being compelling reading. However, I also found it excruciatingly depressing. It deals centrally with five of my top ten most depressing subjects: Alzheimer's disease, agonizing death by cancer, nuclear war, domestic violence and emotional abuse, and being consigned in a nursing home where you're helpless and mistreated and cut off from everything that makes life bearable.

Regarding the alternate timelines, the ending strongly implied that it was Patricia's choice of who to marry that led to sweeping changes between the timelines. I assume it was a "butterfly effect" in which she made one small change that led to several other small changes that ended up having a gigantic domino effect, but I would have liked to be able to see some of how that happened. I couldn't figure out what it was she did that was important. If I recall correctly, history started changing in big ways right after she either got married or didn't. Trish did get involved in political volunteering, but if I recall correctly, history had already changed at that point. Am I misremembering when history started to change, and it was the volunteering after all? Or was there some other crucial action that I missed?

Comments

[recessional]

Given that the choice was who to marry by an ordinary person, I don't find that subtext as strong at all: most people's choices, on that level, are meaningless? And then you can explore simply the idea that happiness and misery on a personal level can exist even within general misery or perfection.

Just, in a world where we LITERALLY HAVE people claiming that same sex relationships and women seeking agency and fulfillment are ruining everything, I find as is a lot more distressing than the idea that a woman's relationship choices don't have much effect on the world.

[rachelmanija]

I see what you're saying, and I don't want to sound like I'm arguing. In the book, though, while obviously there are unfortunate implications overall, the lesbian relationship is portrayed as positive and idyllic - if anything, the subtext is "lesbian relationships are awesome, straight relationships suck." I totally see why it comes across very badly in my review, but the book overall gave me the opposite message.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Seconding this. My bigger problem with the subtext than gay vs. straight is the conflict it sets up between individual happiness and world peace. My own conviction is that if more people didn't allow societal expectations to push them into unhappy situations by default and actually pursued eudaimonia/self-actualization/whatever you want to call it in a thoughtful way, the world would be a better place, not a worse place.

The reason this story works on an emotional level is that its intent is to generate tension by creating a difficult choice, not to send a message about how to make the world a better place, which would be a different story.

[recessional]

Also not trying to pick at something excessively but to me that honestly makes it worse? "In one universe you can pick this wonderful, positive, idyllic and fulfilling relationship with someone of the same sex, and damn the world to hell; in this other universe you can pick a horrible, crushing, abusive relationship with someone of the other sex, but the world will be okay."

The lesbian relationship may be so much more wonderfully perfect - but if Patricia's choices and actions are causal, it's still the reason the world goes to hell, and that just makes that moreso. =\

Without the sexuality issues, that's already kind of . . . horrific to me as someone who has a problem with obsessive rumination on the idea that everything I do to make myself happy is evil, poisonous and making the world a worse place. Add in "oh by the way, it's an f/f relationship path that damns the world" and I'm not really comfortable with that subtext at all.

[nenya_kanadka]

I'm kind of nodding along with this whole thread. I've read several other books by Jo Walton and loved them, and I think she does enjoy themes about choice and agency and the public good and personal happiness.

But this particular combination of them, in conjunction with "happy f/f vs unhappy m/f" is giving me, as a bisexual person with a lot of similar issues to the ones you describe, the wiggins. Just me personally! It sounds like a really well-done book but I don't think I could get past that aspect to fully enjoy it. (It would be hard enough if it was happy het vs miserable het, but this way is even more stressful.)

(Thank you for the review, though, Rachel--I'd heard this title before but wasn't sure what it was about! Now I know, and must remember to pick up another Jo Walton book soon. She's great.)