3.0
Wayward
ByPublisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A “furious and addictive new novel” (The New York Times) about mothers and daughters, and one woman's midlife reckoning as she flees her suburban life.
“A virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Riddled with insights into aging, womanhood, and discontent, Wayward is as elegant as it is raw, and almost as funny as it is sad.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“A comic, vital new novel.” —The New Yorker
Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into "the Mids"—that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation.
When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life—and her family—as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that is coming apart at the seams.
Dana Spiotta's Wayward is a stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female complexity in contemporary America. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird times, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins.
“A virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Riddled with insights into aging, womanhood, and discontent, Wayward is as elegant as it is raw, and almost as funny as it is sad.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“A comic, vital new novel.” —The New Yorker
Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into "the Mids"—that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation.
When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life—and her family—as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that is coming apart at the seams.
Dana Spiotta's Wayward is a stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female complexity in contemporary America. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird times, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins.
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3.0
ClaireA218
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grace
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overwhelmedTBR 📖🫠
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“Yeah. Not much to say other than anyone’s midlife crisis seems to really wreck people’s lives.”
heykristyxo
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Lzabooklover
Created 5 months agoShare
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“I loved this book — mostly because I ended up loving the main character.
Funny thing is, at first, I didn’t particularly like Samantha Raymond. You can’t help but wonder what’s wrong with this woman who suddenly throws her life away to move into a run-down old house in a neglected neighborhood. She seems impulsive, erratic… hard to pin down.
But as the pages go by, something shifts. We follow her through sleepless nights, unanswered texts to her estranged daughter, and odd new friendships with slightly extreme women she meets on online forums. And gradually, we begin to see that Sam isn’t crazy — she’s just lost.
She’s in that strange in-between moment: the life she built (partner, family, motherhood) is fading, and she doesn’t yet know what’s supposed to come next.
She’s deeply moving. And, at times, unintentionally funny.
Dana Spiotta captures this suspended state with subtlety — the anger, the loneliness, and the quiet urge to start over.
A novel that stayed with me long after I finished it.
"MH turned to Sam. “When I turned 50, I was divorced, my son was grown up, and I realised I still had decades to go. It was the oddest thing - just as the culture began to lose interest in me, just as the world decided I was irrelevant, I began to feel more myself than ever. Louder, smarter, strongee. It felt truly adolescent, like I wanted to take drugs and drive fast and shave my head.”
"Sam knew that her love for Ally distorted the view of her. Sam was always shocked when the world didn’t fall out at Ally’s feet. Sometimes Sam wondered - if Ally was another person’s daughter, would I even like her? But she couldn’t actually imagine that. It was impossible for her brain to have perspective on her girl; it was like not being able to smell your own breath. The ferocity of Sam‘s attachment was what made Sam feel like herself.
From the moment Ally was born, pushed out of Sam‘s body (nothing could be more common that motherhood and yet nothing about it could ever ever be banal), Ally became Sam’s sun, Sam’s primary concern. She felt a directedness and a purpose and a meaning she had never experienced before. Another way of putting it: it was the least fake feeling she had ever had, the most earnest. Did all mothers feel this way? Did fathers feel this way? No, yes, doesn’t matter. On some level, it was Ally and then there was every other human on the earth."”
About Dana Spiotta
DANA SPIOTTA is the author of Innocents and Others, which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and was short-listed for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Stone Arabia, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Eat the Document, which was a National Book Award finalist; and Lightning Field. Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and she won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the John Updike Prize in Literature. Spiotta lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.
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