The Story of the Lost Child is no manifesto. Who would want it to be? It is the story that an imposter might write, knowing herself to be one. An upstart’s novel, of bad mothers and bad feminists, bad politicos, of the kind of self-regard necessary to close oneself off in a room of one’s own and write away the day. Or better, it is a story of the trade-offs that went into the making of Elena Greco, the novelist. Maybe it is better to say that my disappointment lies with the realism of the novels that is so like this world, where there is no purely good choice, no correct answer in choosing between mother, friend, feminist, radical, writer, lover.

the surprise comes in the bathetic letdown of their failures