2023-06-08
Dey, a Canadian playwright and novelist, offers a detailed account of family relations when the father is a famous writer.
Narrator Mona Dean, herself a playwright, sums up the whole novel early on: “I had never gotten over my childhood.” Eighteen years earlier, when Mona was 11, her father, Paul, left her mother, Natasha, for his second wife, Cherry. Cherry poisoned him against Mona and her older sister, Juliet, so both girls, like their mother, suffered abandonment. Mona still suffers. A former boxer whose critically acclaimed novel shares the title of Dey’s, Paul comes across as a horrible hybrid of Mailer and Hemingway. (Not coincidentally, Mona performs in her own one-woman play about Hemingway’s doomed granddaughter, Margot; its first line is “To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.”) Mona’s internal dialogue dominates. Even when other characters’ perspectives are offered in occasional third-person descriptions, one senses that Mona, like a novelist, is imagining them to support her own belief that Cherry is an evil stepmother and Eva, Paul and Cherry’s daughter, a malignant half sister. Along with bouts of extreme grief, depression, and jealousy, Mona suffers a litany of trials: her parents’ divorce, an abortion at 15, rape in graduate school, a pregnancy ending in a stillbirth followed by a life-threatening medical crisis. Each incident is real and traumatic, but together the list feels like authorial overkill. So does Mona’s frequent self-congratulation. She makes it clear that she’s renowned for her talent and beauty and crows about her handsome and adoring partner; her loyal, remarkably forgiving best friend; and the unwavering support she’s received from Natasha and Juliet. As for Paul, Mona (or the author) can’t help excusing the wishy-washy narcissist because the poor guy has been manipulated by Cherry and is tortured over his writing. Actually, everyone in this novel is tortured.
Expect sharp observations and fluid prose; don’t expect a sense of humor. Dey’s characters take themselves very seriously.
Stunning . . . [Claudia Dey] balances feverish melodrama with chilled and precise prose . . . In Daughter, Mona wages her own war, over her power as a writer, and as a woman. This beautiful and piercing novel is her hard-won victory.”
—Meg Howrey, The New York Times Book Review
“An unflinching yet tender look into the dark heart of family-inflicted trauma, and the love that persists in spite of betrayal . . . Daughter is a raw, robust portrait of a young woman’s loss—and the courage she needs to live with it.”
—Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle
“Searing and poetic . . . Daughter resounds as a novel about women, motherhood, and art-making.”
—Chelsea Bieker, BOMB
“Gorgeous and unflinching.”
—Sophia June, Nylon
“Claudia Dey is a rare force—luminous yet adamantine . . . Reading [Daughter’s] ravenous, clear-eyed prose . . . feels akin to jumping into an alpine lake. For a few seconds, you’re in shock—and then suddenly, you’re overwhelmed with sensation, hyperconscious of your own aliveness and its perverse proximity to numb unfeeling. The immediacy is unnerving, addictive, almost frightening.”
—Esmé Hogeveen, Interview magazine
“A literary Succession . . . I couldn’t help but think of Ferrante, too: how the greatest stakes are drawn from the most domestic scenarios, how the sentences sometimes extend beyond themselves and other times conclude in a cold staccato.”
—Eliza Smith, Literary Hub
“An intensely psychological novel.”
—Michael Schaub, NPR
“[A] wry, furious new novel . . . Dey’s fluid, feverish sentences are beautiful and unexpected.”
—Michelle Cyca, The Walrus
“Extraordinary . . . An original and powerful novel that a reader won’t easily forget.”
—Fran Hawthorne, New York Journal of Books
“Daughter explores the regenerative power of art, and how making art is making selfhood.”
—CBC
“An emotionally astute exploration of gender and family dynamics.”
—Emily Donaldson, The Globe and Mail
“[Daughter] blurs self with other to create an estrangement so painful that the only escape is in art . . . Emotionally intense.”
—Lillian Liao, Booklist
“Controlled, lucid, and elegant. Daughter is also a formally inventive book—while still being deeply accessible—about how much we can know about others, and how well we can know ourselves. Claudia Dey describes feelings and struggles I haven’t encountered in other novels. I loved this beautiful book.”
—Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour
“In Daughter, Claudia Dey writes beautifully about the special claustrophobia of family and how it can rearrange both art and life.”
—Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“Daughter is a breathtaking and brilliant novel about the exquisite pain and agony that come from loving and needing certain people in our lives to love us back, to love us better. It is also about how we are relentless animals, wild and searching, trying to get our crushed, hungry bodies into our wolf packs. I was profoundly moved by it, so uncompromising and so true.”
—Miriam Toews, author of Fight Night
“I will go wherever Claudia Dey takes me with her prose—always elegant, yet brimming with color and sharpness, it never fails to breathe new life. I loved Daughter in all its gorgeous power.”
—Sophie Mackintosh, author of Cursed Bread
“I gasped. I teared up. This book entered my soul. It is original, seductive, and so alive. Claudia Dey is a phenomenal and profound writer.”
—Leslie Feist, musician
“Daughter reads like a thrilling fever dream. Claudia Dey has figured out the recipe for a novel that becomes a climate, as immersive, honest, and addictive as family.”
—Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Parakeet