Heidi Reimer is a novelist and writing coach. Her debut novel, The Mother Act, is now out from Penguin Random House. Her writing interrogates the lives of women, usually those bent on breaking free of what they’re given to create what they yearn for. Her front row seat to The Mother Act’s theatrical world began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day.
At Electric Lit Reimer tagged eight "nuanced stories that explore the complicated reasons behind mothers leaving their children." One title on the list:
Leave Me by Gayle FormanRead about another entry on the list.
Maribeth Klein is an exhausted working mother. She’s keeping too many balls in the air for her job, her husband, and their four-year-old twins when she has a heartattack at 44. She survives, but her recovery is hampered by the mental and physical labor no one else seems able to shoulder long enough for her to properly recuperate. When she withdraws $25,000 of inheritance money, pays cash for a train ticket, and disappears, her act feels like a matter of life and death. Alone in her new furnished apartment, she grapples both with what she’s done to her family and with her own experience as an adoptee. One night she watches a movie about a mother who abandons her kids, and she knows the character will be redeemed because she’s given screen time and a voice. Despite her own justifications, Maribeth fears that in the made-for-TV movie of her life, she is the villain.
The Page 69 Test: Leave Me.
--Marshal Zeringue