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Narrated by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Ann-Marie MacDonaldUnabridged — 11 hours, 48 minutes
Narrated by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Ann-Marie MacDonaldUnabridged — 11 hours, 48 minutes
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…[a] big, troubling and brave new novel…Adult Onset puts MacDonald's readers in the interesting and uncomfortable position of liking someone who is occasionally awful. Then again, who can't relate to that?
This material might have gone too far in the direction of either soap opera or sitcom, but Ms. MacDonald strikes just the right tone as she exposes the brutal undercurrents of domestic life.
02/09/2015
MacDonald’s (Fall on Your Knees) riveting drama features 48-year-old Mary Rose MacKinnon as she dutifully cares for her two young children in Toronto, outwardly making all the right choices with organic foods and extreme toddler proofing. Inwardly, however, she frets over potential disaster scenarios while struggling to retain a sense of self. Although Mary Rose writes young adult fiction and has a loyal fan base, she can’t make headway on the third novel in her trilogy. “She never imagined she would be a ‘morning person’ or drive a station wagon or be capable of following printed instructions for an array of domestic contraptions that come with some assembly required; until now, the only thing she had ever been able to assemble was a story.” During a week when her partner, Hilary, is out of town, Mary Rose reflects on her tumultuous childhood, which forced her to shoulder survivor’s guilt after the loss of would-be siblings, while coping with her lifelong painful bone condition. Glimmers of escalating anger—a family trait—begin to creep through her constructed veneer in Hilary’s absence. MacDonald’s strong narrative is a compelling examination of the loneliness and the often-absurd helplessness of being a parent of young children. (Apr.)
"Ms. MacDonald strikes just the right tone as she exposes the brutal undercurrents of domestic life . . . [a] big, troubling and brave...novel."
"In Adult Onset, MacDonald . . . has again delivered a masterpiece."
"[Adult Onset is] the most accurate description of solo parenting I’ve ever read . . . [MacDonald’s] writing is dizzying and brilliant, and often disorienting, which beautifully supports the novel’s themes, perfectly capturing how it feels to be unmoored and seemingly alone."
"A complex, troubling novel that cuts with surgical precision into the sinew and muscle of family life."
"Ann-Marie MacDonald captures the dark hilarity of parenthood like nobody else. I gulped down Adult Onset in a single day."
Praise for Adult Onset
"[B]ig, troubling and brave…novel."
—New York Times Book Review
"[Adult Onset is] the most accurate description of solo parenting I've ever read....[MacDonald's] writing is dizzying and brilliant, and often disorienting, which beautifully supports the novel's themes, perfectly capturing how it feels to be unmoored and seemingly alone."
—Associated Press
"Riveting . . . MacDonald’s strong narrative is a compelling examination of the loneliness and the often-absurd helplessness of being a parent of young children."
—Publishers Weekly
“Ms. MacDonald strikes just the right tone as she exposes the brutal undercurrents of domestic life.”
—New York Times
"This is an affecting, multilayered account of domestic ennui and the painful effects of long-held secrets on three generations."
—Kirkus
"[F]ine, clearly detailed writing makes for an accomplished read..."
—Library Journal
"Ann-Marie MacDonald captures the dark hilarity of parenthood like nobody else. I gulped down Adult Onset in a single day."
—Emma Donoghue, author of Room and Frog Music
"A complex, troubling novel that cuts with surgical precision into the sinew and muscle of family life."
—Sarah Waters, author of The Paying Guests
“MacDonald fashions, after a 10-year hiatus, a novel impossible to put down once begun. . . . MacDonald . . . scans the parameters of parenthood with an unflinching gaze. Her depiction of the perils of everyday domestic turmoil can be harrowing as well as, at times, hilarious. . . . Since MacDonald’s books have all been so extraordinary, it is impossible to rank Adult Onset against the others. Suffice it to say the novel is superb, a fine blending of fact and fiction, of remembered incident and forgotten history, a wonderfully written treatise on the power of the past to impinge on the present.”
—Nancy Schiefer, The London Free Press (also in the Toronto Sun, Edmonton Sun)
“In basic factual terms, there is barely a playing card’s width between life and art in [Adult Onset,] an intricate, gripping novel that is also a master class in turning the personal into the universal through art.”
—Brian Bethune, Maclean’s
“Adult Onset is the third novel by Ann-Marie Macdonald. . . . The scene is set for a roller-coaster ride offering brief moments of serenity amid increasingly terrifying plunges into the darkness of Mary Rose’s past. Suspense builds; surely, horror awaits. . . . Macdonald’s book remains spellbinding throughout. It is impossible to forget, despite—or perhaps because of—an ending that leaves the reader exhausted and with no easy answers.”
—Paul Gessell, Quill & Quire
“Though all of Ann-Marie’s works are very distinct entities . . . her third book has the same beautifully crafted descriptions and character-driven storytelling that readers have come to love from the writer.”
—Jill Buchner, Canadian Living
“One of the remarkable things about Adult Onset is how viscerally and honestly it deals with the trials and tribulations of domestic life.”
—Adrian Chamberlain, Times Colonist
“One of the highly anticipated novels of the season is the latest from the award-winning novelist Ann-Marie MacDonald.”
—Joseph Planta, TheCommentary.ca
“If you’re of [an anxious] disposition, reading Ann-Marie MacDonald’s latest novel, Adult Onset, is both a blessing and a curse. It’s certainly an accurate depiction, and best described as exposure therapy—an exercise in committing yourself to multiple hours of low-grade anxiety, like walking into a crowded, sweltering room if you’re claustrophobic, wandering a fluorescent-lit hospital if you’re a hypochondriac, or travelling a long distance via air if you have a fear of flying. There’s an inexplicable sense of doom to overcome if you’re going to get through it, a looming spectre of disaster, even if all seems well on the surface as you turn each page. Adult Onset is MacDonald’s long-awaited third novel, following her highly successful blockbuster 1996 debut, Fall on Your Knees, and her 2003 Giller Prize shortlisted The Way The Crow Flies. . . . At its core, Adult Onset is about what happens when we are unable to face the physical and emotional pain of our past head on, and how the chronic illness of trauma will haunt even the most insignificant moments of our days. . . . It is a high achievement for a writer to portray the persistent worry of avoidance in a way than rings true, and MacDonald has beyond succeeded. It is in this sense that Adult Onset is both a book that is difficult to endure, and one worthy of our praise and attention. . . . Many of us will see ourselves in the profound discomfort MacDonald has conjured, and though the narrative lends itself to frustration as a result, the book is an absolute triumph of terrifying authenticity.”
—Stacey May Fowles, National Post
“Art imitates life in Adult Onset. . . . Tackling many heavy topics including miscarriage, depression, homophobia, and physical abuse, Adult Onset is an overall enjoyable read focusing on guilt, grief, memory, and family.”
—Carlyn Schellenberg, The Manitoban
“A stunning and powerful work that will knock readers on their collective keister. . . . Bold novel. . . . In Adult Onset, every character has depth, a story, nuance.”
—Ron Johnson, Post City Toronto
“Celebrated author, Ann-Marie Macdonald . . . is poised to return to the literary spotlight with her first book in more than a decade. . . . The multi-faceted author, actor, playwright, and broadcaster refashioned events from her own life.”
—Vit Wagner, Quill & Quire
“One of the most anticipated new fiction releases this fall.”
—Laura Eggertson, Toronto Star
“Scheduled to appear sometime this year, MacDonald’s Adult Onset is not yet being publicized; there is no cover or plot summary posted on the Random House Canada website or on Amazon.ca. It doesn’t matter. Her many fans, having read her first two books, the epic and masterful Fall On Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies, are waiting with bated breath for whatever the new book turns out to be. If Adult Onset is anything like the previous two novels it will be a marvelous, complex romp through recent history and current reality, crammed with memorable characters offering a stimulating view of the world.”
—The Rover (Montreal)
“Everyone is keeping a tight lid on what it’s all about, but I can guarantee you it’ll be a bestseller.”
—Brenna Clarke Gray, Book Riot (Adult Onset is one of “10 Reasons You Should [Re]Discover CanLit in 2014”)
“Adult Onset’s low simmer is a change of pace from MacDonald’s previous murder-mystery spy thriller The Way the Crow Flies, and literary debut Fall on Your Knees. . . . What remains, however, is MacDonald’s effortless ability to quickly spin pathos into humour, making the suffering of her characters humane and never heavy-handed.”
—Leah Golob, The Georgia Straight
"Suffice it to say [Adult Onset] is superb, a fine blending of fact and fiction, of remembered incident and forgotten history, a wonderfully written treatise on the power of the past to impinge on the present."
—The Toronto Sun
"A lively, moving, and often funny story that has the potential to help usher in a new era of honest literary depictions of families in all their permutations."
—The Walrus
"MacDonald’s book remains spellbinding throughout. It is impossible to forget."
—Quill & Quire
"In Adult Onset, MacDonald tracks what looks like a well-do-to creative-class person who is wrestling with a dark force, except in this case the menace is largely confined to the interior, a matter of memory and psychology. And she has again delivered a masterpiece."
—The Globe & Mail
"[Th]e book is an absolute triumph of terrifying authenticity. . . .Adult Onset is . . . worthy of our praise and attention."
—The National Post
Praise for Fall On Your Knees:
“In this resonant first novel… Ms. MacDonald skillfully shifts the story backward and forward in time, giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half-buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed.”
—The New York Times
“The uniqueness of MacDonald’s voice, and of her approach, lies in her ability to distill…She can capture, deftly, the fleeting moment, the fragmented feelings that make up so much of what we term ‘understanding’. Thus, complex experiences become single, vivid images. It is a rare talent that can produce it for others to see.”
—The London Times
Praise for The Way the Crow Flies:
"Remarkable...an engrossing, disturbing and layered tale."
—The Chicago Tribune
"One of the finest novels I've read in a long, long time."
—The Washington Post
04/01/2015
As winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and a finalist for many more, Canadian author MacDonald (Fall on Your Knees) comes with sterling credentials reflected in the engrossing flow of this book. YA fiction author Mary Rose MacKinnon has put her career on hold to tend to the two young children she has with her partner, Hil, who's spreading her wings as a theater director. The frazzled insanity of parenthood is well rendered here, but Mary Rose is also dealing with physical and psychic pain from her past. Her military father and unbalanced mother, Dolly, of Lebanese descent, lost two babies, including one who would have been named Mary Rose, and as a youngster Mary Rose suffered pain in her arm that led to multiple bone surgeries. The pain is returning, as is a sense that there's more to her difficulties than her parents admit. In addition, their resistance when she came out has melted but still troubles Mary Rose, who's worrying Hil by drifting closer to the edge. VERDICT Though the book seems somewhat drawn out, the fine, clearly detailed writing makes for an accomplished read blending the familiar parental/spousal angst with the specifics of Mary Rose's struggle.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
2015-01-22
Assaulted by mysterious pains and bracketed by painful childhood memories, Mary Rose MacKinnon engages in power struggles with her willful toddler and endures the stresses of stay-at-home parenting while her partner, Hilary, is out of town. An acclaimed young-adult novelist, Mary Rose is suffering from severe writer's block, unable to complete the third volume in her popular series. Despite the surface comforts of life in her liberal, upper-middle-class Toronto enclave, she feels an inexplicable sense of alienation from her environment; she distances herself from the other mothers at her child's preschool and avoids communication with her own parents, despite their belated acceptance of her homosexuality and loving acceptance of Hilary and their grandchildren. When Mary Rose's charming Lebanese mother, Dolly, was younger, she had numerous miscarriages, stillbirths and babies who died shortly after birth, and she seems to be fixating on this tragic period many decades later. The effect of this sad legacy on family dynamics has never been fully explored, and Mary Rose has many vague, unspoken questions about her own childhood, the answers to which might help explain her emotional paralysis and phantom arm pains, as well as the mysterious bone cysts she suffered as a young girl. MacDonald (The Way the Crow Flies, 2004, etc.) integrates three narratives into this novel—Mary Rose's mundane day-to-day existence, Dolly's experience of severe depression as a young mother lamenting her lost babies, and Mary Rose's novels, which parallel elements of her own family story distorted through the lens of teen fantasy fiction. While clever, the novel within the novel seems a bit forced. There is a recurring theme of impostors and doppelgängers and a shrewd twinning motif, but the reader is always conscious of the writer's craft. Of the three, Dolly's story is the most naturalistically and sensitively portrayed. Despite the too-neat Freudian implications of Mary Rose's story, this is an affecting, multilayered account of domestic ennui and the painful effects of long-held secrets on three generations.
| BN ID: | 2940171963361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2015 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
MONDAY
Dreams of an Everyday Housewife
In the midway of this, our mortal life, Mary Rose MacKinnon is at her cheerful kitchen table checking e-mail. It is Monday. Her two-year-old is busy driving a doll stroller into the baseboard, so she has a few minutes.
Your 99 friends are waiting to join you on Facebook. She deletes it, flinches at another invitation to appear at a literary festival, skims her five-year-old’s school newsletter online and signs up to accompany his class to the reptile museum. She skips guiltily over unanswered messages and cute links sent by friends—including one from her brother that shows a fat woman whose naked torso looks like Homer Simpson’s face—and is about to close it down when her laptop bings in time with the oven and the incoming e-mail catches her eye. It is highlighted in queasy cyber yellow and bears a dialogue box: Mail thinks this is junk. She eyes it gingerly, fearing a virus or another ad for Viagra. It is from some joker—as her father would say—with the address ladyfromhell@sympatico.ca and in the subject line: Some things really do get batter . . .
A baking newsletter from a mad housewife? She bites, and clicks.
Hi Mister,
Mum and I just watched the video entitled “It Gets Better” and I thought I’d try out the new e-mail to tell you how proud we are that you and Hilary are such good role models for young people who may be struggling against prejudice.
Love,
Dad
PS: Hope this gets to you. Just got the e-mail installed yesterday. I am now officially no longer a “Cybersaur”! Off to “surf the net” now.
My goodness.
She types:
Dear Dad,
Congratulations and welcome to the twenty-first century!
No, that sounds sarcastic. Delete.
Dear Dad,
Welcome to the digital age! And thanks, it means a lot to me that you and Mum saw the video and that it means a lot to you that
She is proud that he is proud. And that he is proud that Mum is proud; of whom Mary Rose is also proud. Sigh. She does not like screens, convinced as she is they have some sort of neurologically hazing effect. She ought to write her father an actual card with an actual pen to let him know how much this means to her. She gets up and slides a tray of vine-ripened tomatoes into the oven to slow-roast—they are from Israel, is that wrong?
“Ow. Careful, Maggie.”
“No,” croons the child in reply.
She returns to the table, its bright non-toxic vinyl IKEA cloth obscured by bills and reminders for service calls she needs to book for the various internal organs of her house. Bing! Your 100 friends are waiting . . . A month or so ago she tripped on a root in cyberspace and accidentally joined Facebook; now she can’t figure out how to unjoin. She has visited her page once, its silhouette of a human head empty but for a question mark at the centre, awaiting her picture, like an unetched tombstone—we know you’re coming . . . eventually. Her unadorned wall was full of names, many of which she did not recognize, some of which bore the rank odour of the crypt of high school. What is this mania for keeping in touch? she wonders. Mary Rose MacKinnon is unused to continuity. She grew up in a family that moved every few years until she was a teenager, and each time it was as if everything and everyone vanished behind them. Or entered a different realm, a mythic one wherein time stopped, the children she had known never grew older and, as in a cartoon, people and places retained the same clothes and aspect day after day, regardless of weather, explosions or being shot by Elmer Fudd. She would not change a thing, however, each move having brought with it a sense of renewal; as though she had outrun a shameful past—starting at age three. Nowadays, she reflects, no one is allowed to outrun anything. If one kid slugs another in the park, they’re packed off to therapy.
Delete.
People used to joke about Xeroxed newsletters sent by relentlessly chipper housewives at Christmas. Their effect, and perhaps their purpose, was to make everyone who received them feel bad about their own lives. Nowadays people torture one another online with pictures of their golden-retriever lifestyles and tweets about must-see plays in New York with one-word titles, new restaurants in Toronto with four tables, human rights abuses in China and the truth behind the down duvet industry. Where is the meadow of yesteryear? Whither the sound of one insect scaling a stalk of grass? The time-silvered fence post in the afternoon sun? What has become of time itself in its expansive, unparcelled state, uncorseted by language? Where have all the tiny eternities gone? Gone to urgencies, every one.
As she types this e-mail to her father, icebergs are evaporating and falling as rain on her February garden, where a water-boarded tulip has foolishly put its head up—are things getting better or worse? Bing! Matthew is invited to Eli’s Big Boy Birthday Party! Click here to view your e-vite! A birthday party at some obscure suburban facility north of Yonge and the 401, do these parents have no compassion? She peers into the depths of info and goodies! trying to find a date and time amid exploding balloons and floating dinosaurs.
She used to console herself with the notion that the human species would burn itself out like a virus and Earth would recover Her bounty and diversity. But that was before she became a mother.
Nowadays? How old is she? No one says nowadays nowadays. She’ll be making references to the Great Depression before she knows it.
It is April, today is the first—though anyone might be forgiven for getting the months muddled considering it did rain all through February. She wonders if that impacted the usual February suicide rate. Impacted did not used to be a verb. Sometime in the nineties it got verbed, like so many other unsuspecting nouns.
Dear Dad,
I
