All She Carries Alone
She wrote forty-seven letters. Her daughter never opened one of them.
Eleanor Hartman is a professor of literature who has spent her life explaining other people's silences and none of her own. Fifteen years ago she stood at a lectern in Chicago on the afternoon of her daughter's graduation. She had known the date for eleven months. She went anyway.
She has been writing ever since - careful, beautiful, unsendable letters, and then sending them, and then hearing nothing back. It has become the shape of her life: presence at a distance, love delivered by post.
Then the wedding invitation arrives, and there is a second card inside it, and the second card is not an invitation at all.
What follows is not a reconciliation. It is something harder and more interesting: a woman finally required to be in the room.
Set across one autumn in Boston and three days in California, All She Carries Alone is a quiet, exacting novel about estrangement between a mother and a daughter - about the difference between writing to someone and reaching them, about what it costs to keep apologising for the wrong thing, and about the small, unglamorous mechanics of how people actually find their way back.
For readers of Ann Napolitano, Celeste Ng and Anne Tyler.
Includes questions for reading groups.
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