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MOTHEREST

Kristen Iskandrian

MOTHEREST is an inventive and moving coming-of-age story that captures the pain of fractured family life, the heat of new love, and that particular magic of female friendship— while interrogating the complexities that exist between a daughter and a mother.

It's the early 1990s, and Agnes is running out of people she can count on. A new college student, she is caught between the broken home she leaves behind and the (be)wilderness of life on campus—full of booze and boys and rife with loneliness. What she needs most is her mother, who disappears seemingly once and for all, after leaving Agnes at school. She also misses her brother, who left the family permanently and tragically a few years prior. As Agnes sinks into a new romance, mines female friendships for intimacy, and tries desperately to find her footing, she writes letters to her mother, both in an effort to conjure a closeness they never had and an attempt to translate her experiences to herself. When she finds out she is pregnant, Agnes begins to contend with what it means to be a mother and, in some ways, what it means to be your own mother. The end of the world as she knows it is also, Agnes soon learns, the beginning of a brand new one. Motherest has stylistic elements of Karen Russell and Meg Wolitzer, along with the humor and structure of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Laura van den Berg (Find Me) hails Kristen as “an utterly thrilling voice, and Mother, Motherer, Motherest will slay you with its inventive, spiky, and heartrending investigation into the dark mysteries of family life – and the quest for a private identity within it. A smart, gorgeous, and singular debut.” Kirsten Iskandrian's story “The Inheritors” was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 (a Juror Favorite of James Lasdun), after originally appearing in Tin House. She is a Juror for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 along with Tessa Hadley and Michael Parker. Her other fiction has appeared in Denver Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Gulf Coast, PANK, Mississippi Review, and many other places, including Harper Perennial’s 52 Stories anthology in 2009. Kristen has a BA in English from the College of the Holy Cross, and an MA and PhD in literature and creative writing from University of Georgia. She currently works as the Managing Editor for the Journal of Nuclear Cardiology and, for fun, is the Food Editor of the new literary endeavor realpants.com. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

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Book Published 2017-08-01 by Twelve

Comments

Iskandrian's stellar first novel... is sharp and honest, recounting Agnes's journey in a crafty mix of first-person narration and epistolary forms, and Agnes's voice charms with a subtle undercurrent of humor and sarcasm making this a delightful and satisfying reading experience. Iskandrian is a writer to watch.

Agnes’ voice, in her heartrending letters and her funny, sad, dead-true perceptions, propels Iskandrian’s brilliant debut about life’s continuously shifting, perplexing intimacies.

MOTHEREST transforms from a smart... broody meditation on abandonment into an emotionally brimming story of new life and new responsibility. It becomes saturated with hope.

Kristen Iskandrian has done more than write a book:she's created a world. So particular and familiar is its setting (the '90s; college), so nuanced is its narrator (broken, whip-smart, wildly perceptive and yet frozen in her own fate), and so poignant is its writing (there are poems in these paragraphs!),you'llfind yourself lingering in this world long after you've turned the last page.MOTHERESTis a fresh and devastating deep dive into womanhood, motherhood, teenagehood, and grief, and is an important reminder of the aches and wonders of being alive.

An utterly thrilling voice, and MOTHEREST will slay you with its inventive, spiky, and heartrending investigation into the dark mysteries of family life—and the quest for a private identity within it. A smart, gorgeous, and singular debut.

Heartbreaking, hilarious, and poignant—often at the same time. A powerfully perceptive story written with love, realism, and humor and that feels fresh despite the familiar terrain.

Motherest is a moving story of loss and loneliness and parenthood and love, in all their vast human multitudes. It’s an intensely perceptive and honest novel about the sometimes unbridgeable gap between parents and children. Kristen Iskandrian’s narrator is an extraordinary character: a woman searching desperately for connection, an island trying to become a peninsula. You will want to yell at her, as I did, and you will want to cry with her, as I did, and you will be transfixed until the very last page.

I highly enjoyedMOTHEREST—a powerful, moving, complex, wry, sensitive novel about crying, laughing, waiting, leaving, pain, loss, endurance, secrets, surprises, ambivalence, possession, parents, pregnancy, childbirth, college, home, and love.

Agnes is one of the most unforgettable protagonists I’ve read in recent years – as if a Dickens heroine was reimagined by a literary girl gang made up of Deb Olin Unferth, Katherine Dunn and Lydia Davis.

With delicacy, Iskandrian guides us through Agnes's transformation from a passive, bewildered teenager to a young woman with realistic and flexible notions about love and becoming a parent. The final chapters bring a wrenching twist - beautifully handled - that tests her mettle... MOTHEREST is wonderfully agnostic about differing approaches to the nurturing process, generous in its view of the way not just mothers but fathers, daughters and siblings struggle with what life brings them, doing the best they can.