Synopsis
Anna Dunlap is recently divorced from Brian, and retains custody of their four-year-old daughter Molly. Anna begins seeing the much younger Leo, an artist, who provides emotional and sexual fulfillment for Anna, and is also very friendly with Molly. But while Leo is taking a shower one day, Molly comes into the bathroom; Leo allows her to touch him. Brian finds out and sues for custody of Molly, not necessarily because he has Molly's best interests at heart but to revenge himself on Anna for the divorce. Miller has stated that her experience as a day-care teacher helped her enormously in writing the scenes involving Molly.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1987-04-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 464 pages | | Weight: | 8.0 oz |
Industry Reviews
"How brave that a first novel should attempt these extraordinarily difficult questions, questions so emotionally tough that they complicate the usual business of the novel, the expectations of character and plot. And how brave of Sue Miller to avoid easy answers, to leave the puzzle finally unsolved. Because her Anna is, in the end, human rather than heroic, the novel is all the more disturbing and powerful.
Nation - Josephine Humphries (05/10/1986)
"Thanks to Sue Miller's gift for precise psychological details, her sure sense of narrative and her simple compassion for ordinary lives, this powerful novel proves as subtle as it is dramatic, as durable--in its emotional afterlife--as it is instantly readable."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (04/23/1986)
"'The Good Mother' would be an extraordinarily skillful piece of fiction from a veteran, so as a first book it is a very remarkable accomplishment...."
Chicago Tribune - Catherine Petroski (04/27/1986)
"Every once in a while, a first novelist rockets into the literary atmosphere with a novel so accomplished that it shatters the common assumption that for a writer to have mastery, he or she must serve a long, auspicious apprenticeship. The novel arrives, all parts gleaming, ticking, and we are filled with awe. However did the novice learn to build this thing? We marvel. But the question is beside the point, which is that the thing exists, has form, energy and power. This is the case with Sue Miller's 'Good Mother', the work of a writer who has thus far published only a handful of short stories."
New York Times Book Review - Linda Wolfe (04/27/1986)
"While many readers may be put off by Miller's graphic treatment of her protagonist's relationship with her lover, I feel they will be drawn inexorably into the bind-and-bind of the novel's cause-and-effect world."
Christian Science Monitor - Ron Burnett (04/30/1986)
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