Mrs. Dalloway immediately came to mind when I first heard of Fran Littlewood’s 2022 novel, Amazing Grace Adams, about a woman spending the day getting ready for a party. Yet British author Littlewood has an altogether different reference point. In the 1993 film Falling Down, Michael Douglas plays a nihilistic man who abandons his car on an LA freeway to trudge through town to attend his daughter’s birthday party, despite the lack of an invitation from his fed-up ex-wife. I didn’t see this film; it sounded to me like a cinematic exercise in soulless brutality. Yet the movie inspired Littlewood to write her own version of the tale. What would make a woman abandon her car and all reason to try to win back her family?
Londoner Grace Adams is a polyglot. At an academic convention, she meets charming Ben and bests him in a contest, winning a free vacation. Impulsively, she invites him to join her, and a weekend fling eventually leads to marriage and a daughter, Lotte.
When we first meet Grace, that fairytale is long over. Lotte is a sullen teen with a crumbling future, and Ben has finally given up on his complicated wife. Abandoned by husband and child, recently fired, Grace is a study in pure rage. We read in equal parts amusement and horror as she ditches her car in the middle of nightmare traffic to walk a Love Island birthday cake to her daughter miles across town, accruing injuries, police reports, and a stolen golf club as she goes. Perimenopausal symptoms plague Grace as she makes her way resolutely, somewhat insanely, through city streets towards a family that has no interest in seeing her. Yet Littlewood wisely refrains from making this story all about midlife hormones lest Grace’s erratic, almost comically violent actions be seen as just another version of “it must be that time of the month.”
As the backstory deepens, we learn of the trauma that led to the unraveling of Grace’s family. Unsurprisingly, it cuts to the heart of the impossible job of motherhood. “For the first time she understands why her mum said what she did all those years ago. It was because of the guilt. The same guilt Grace feels. The universal mothering guilt that is surely implanted in the delivery room along with that Pitocin shot. One out, one in. This crazed truth is that no matter how hard they try, mothers feel they have failed their kids, that they are not good enough, not quite up to the job. When her mum said she wished she’d never had children, she didn’t mean it, Grace thinks. Of course she didn’t, and it’s like a revelation that should have come years ago.”
Amazing Grace Adams is, by turns, emotional and hilarious in its thunderous drive towards resolution. One would think that this would have caused me to fly through the pages, as no doubt many readers did when the book was anointed by Read with Jenna. Yet speed wasn’t my response. I read Amazing Grace Adams in bits and pieces over days, happy to rejoin her in her many incarnations: as a young genius, a sudden wife and mother, an angry woman with steely-eyed reserve and no fucks left to give. I desperately wanted Grace to get to that party, reconnect with her fragile family, and finally hand over that damned cake, but given how much I enjoyed cheering on this deeply flawed, hope-filled mess of an everywoman, I also didn’t want to let her go.