Mass Mothering

A haunting, indelible novel of collective grief, resistance, and the radical, life-affirming virtue of testimony

A. is an amateur translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. Adrift and burdened by debt following a medical trauma, she makes rent caring for a young boy who is not and could never be her own. Her nights are spent on the dance floor, chasing spontaneous connection. There, she encounters N., who shares her numbed state and sometimes her bed.

Among N.’s meager possessions, A. comes across a slim book about an unnamed foreign town of disappearing boys. The book, Field Notes, documents the stories of a community of mothers who assemble to mourn their missing sons together. A. is transfixed by this collective chorus of primal grief, the mothers’ preternatural strength, and their intuitive care for one another. When a near-assault stuns A. out of her inertia, she takes off for the city where Field Notes was written in search of its author and the end of the story. But A.’s digging leads her instead to the traces of a murdered poet, a mysterious woman whose legacy will intersect unexpectedly and pivotally with A.’s own life.

Poignant and profoundly humane, Mass Mothering is told through layered voices, written fragments, and recorded testimonies. It is a luminous story of the mutuality of grief, the aftershocks of violence in a globalized era, and the world-bending force of a mother’s love.

Sarah Bruni is the author of the novels Mass Mothering and The Night Gwen Stacy Died. A graduate of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis and the MA in Latin American Studies at Tulane University, she has taught English and writing classes in New York and St. Louis, and volunteered as a writer-in-schools in San Francisco and Montevideo, Uruguay. Her fiction has appeared in the Boston Review, and her translations have appeared in the Buenos Aires Review. She lives in Chicago with her family.