The Long Answer: A Novel

by Anna Hogeland

Overview

A woman considers pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships in this profound and provocative novel.

Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna's own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the children they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in.
 
The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593418130
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Anna Hogeland is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. She lives in Vermont.

Editorial Reviews

04/04/2022

Hogeland’s lackluster debut follows a group of women and charts their feelings about their pregnancies. First, pregnant narrator Anna gets a call from her older sister, Margot, with the news that Margot had a miscarriage. Some weeks later, Margot calls Anna to talk about her friend Elizabeth, and Anna thinks about how she’s jealous of Elizabeth’s friendship with Margot, which deepened after Elizabeth, who is also pregnant, confided a secret to Margot. At a prenatal yoga class, Anna meets a young woman, Corrie, who shares a story about an earlier pregnancy followed by abortion. Then Hogeland delves into a problem with Anna’s pregnancy, and her writer husband’s attempts to write a story about it. Later, Anna travels to Joshua Tree, Calif., where she meets an older woman named Marisol, who tells her a story about her own pregnancy and approaching menopause, which Anna uses in her own attempt at writing fiction. The gestures at metafiction feel undercooked (“This was never supposed to be part of this novel,” Anna narrates in the middle of the Marisol episode), though Hogeland does a nice job showing the degree to which the women’s lives are shaped by reproduction. Still, this doesn’t quite cohere. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (June)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2022-03-30
Anna Hogeland, a 30-year-old pregnant writer who shares the author's name, chronicles the often unspoken fears and desires of the mothers and would-be mothers in her life.

When Anna’s sister, Margot, with whom she’s always had a fraught relationship, calls to tell her she’s had a miscarriage before Anna even knew she was pregnant, it sets off a series of conversations among sisters, close friends, and even strangers in Irvine, California; Anchorage, Alaska; and various points in between about the “closed grief” of pregnancy loss. Then, when things seem to take a turn for the worse in Anna’s own pregnancy, her newfound empathy is put to the test: Will she emerge strengthened by this experience or as a diminished version of her former self? An introspective, psychologically astute, and engaging debut, this novel delves into territory that is rarely explored in fiction: the raw and devastating costs and painful choices that women face when a new life ends before it can begin. For fans of Rachel Cusk’s Outline or Claire Vaye Watkins’ I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, here is a heart-rending tale that blurs the line between fiction and reality. In tight, unassuming prose, Hogeland unravels a complex web of stories about other women’s lives, the stories they tell her about their own pregnancies and families, as Anna (the narrator) attempts to pinpoint which parts are true and which are false. At a critical moment we realize that the story she's telling and retelling about these other women is, in fact, the one she has been trying to avoid, the one that wasn’t ever supposed to end up in these pages: her own story. “This was never supposed to be part of this novel,” she writes.

A startling meditation on grief and family and betrayal and the stories we tell about ourselves.

Kirkus Reviews

"A breathtaking roundup of the many ways that women carry and lose babies and pregnancies, so many possible and impossible choices to be made, so many capitulations and coercions to be endured. All the narratives in the novel make clear that the only thing that makes any of it bearable is the agency each woman can claim...These stories are crucial." – The New York Times Book Review

"A triumph of human portraiture, as subtle as it is seething." – The Sunday Times (UK)

“A compelling, often-heartbreaking tale of belonging, loss, and rebirth. Looking beyond pregnancy's physical transformations, Hogeland explores what it means to feel parental, to choose a life bigger than your own, or to lose a precious gift…The Long Answer is a heartfelt, finely wrought journey for fans of Suzanne Finnamore, Erica Jong, and Marian Keyes.” – Booklist, starred review
 
“An introspective, psychologically astute, and engaging debut… a heart-rending tale that blurs the line between fiction and reality…A startling meditation on grief and family and betrayal and the stories we tell about ourselves.” – Kirkus, starred review

"I’ve never read a book that speaks so bravely, and eloquently, about the burdens that women carry. Hogeland brings moments of darkness into the light. Astonishing. A masterpiece." – Steve Almond, New York Times-bestselling author of All the Secrets of the World

“A brilliant debut, both coolly empathetic and searingly personal, a powerful bridge between fiction's two current modes. Anna Hogeland writes beautifully, with unwavering passion and insight, about the complexities of motherhood and female relationships.” – Jess Walter, New York Times-bestselling author of The Cold Millions

"In her gorgeous debut, Anna Hogeland expertly explores issues of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, and the uncertainty and trauma that too often accompany these major events. Hogeland's empathetic protagonist absorbs the stories of the women around her, ultimately clinging to them for meaning in the face of her own tragedy. This book is a woman's space, and readers will feel heard and seen." — Erika Krouse, author of Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation

“A brilliantly constructed novel about women, and about the power of love in the heart of one woman through whom these female souls are elucidated, their passions, their terrible losses, and their bravery. These characters breathe on the page, and their stories are moving and involving. Anna Hogeland is a wonderfully talented writer.” – Richard Bausch, author of Peace

“In concentric circles of stories told and stories secreted away, The Long Answer is about women making life and losing life and about fertility itself—the promise and the more complicated truth. This beautiful novel tugs at friendship, marriage, family and women in moments of heartbreaking and miraculous transformation.” – Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

From the Publisher