Mar 26

Mar 26 Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Author: Maddie Mortimer
Publisher: Scribner
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

This lyrical debut novel is at once a passionate coming-of-age story, a meditation on illness and death, and a kaleidoscopic journey through one woman’s life—told in part by the malevolent voice of her disease.

Lia, her husband Harry, and their beloved daughter, Iris, are a precisely balanced family of three. With Iris struggling to navigate the social tightrope of early adolescence, their tender home is a much-needed refuge. But when a sudden diagnosis threatens to derail each of their lives, the secrets of Lia’s past come rushing into the present, and the world around them begins to transform.

Deftly guided through time, we discover the people who shaped Lia’s youth; from her deeply religious mother to her troubled first love. In turn, each will take their place in the shifting landscape of Lia’s body; at the center of which dances a gleeful narrator, learning her life from the inside, growing more emboldened by the day.

Pivoting between the domestic and the epic, the comic and the heart-breaking, this astonishing novel unearths the darkness and levity of one woman’s life to symphonic effect.

TL;DR Review

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is an unconventional, heartbreaking, extremely beautiful book about a woman dying of cancer. It’s part poetry, part narrative, and unlike anything else.

For you if: You like books that play with language in unique ways, and you don’t mind feeling a little bit unmoored in the story as you read.

Full Review

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. I’m so glad it was, because otherwise I would probably never have picked it up — and it was both heartbreaking and incredibly beautiful. In fact, I’m shocked this didn’t make the shortlist.

Part poetry, part narrative, this book is super unconventional. It’s about a woman named Lia, who has cancer. It alternates between sections that feel more traditional, in which we get Lia’s story (both her present-day relationship with her husband and fierce daughter, and her heavy past), and those that are told (abstractly) from the POV of what most people interpret as her cancer itself.

If you love books that play with language in creative ways — including poetic, unconventional typesetting — you will love this book. On the other hand, if you’re uncomfortable feeling a little bit unmoored inside a story, you may not. If you stop to try to interpret or “understand” every paragraph, you’ll quickly become frustrated. Because so much reads like poetry, you have to let yourself sink in and be swept away, trusting Mortimer to carry you out the other side (she will). I listened along as I read in print (do NOT skip the print copy, I beg you), and that approach really helped me do it.

Mortimer wrote this book in tribute to her mother who died of cancer, and the rendering is exquisite. The slight dizziness of the reading experience interprets the experience of having a loved one (or self) with a terminal illness, the foreignness and familiarity of the body, the inescapable momentum of it all. Where is the line between self and body, trauma and invasion? Perhaps there is none.

There is a lot more I could say — about Iris, Lia’s daughter, and how expertly she was written. About Lia’s difficult mother, or upbringing in religion, or relationship with her sexuality. About the complicated kind of abuse and toxicity that shaped her life. But I’m running out of space! So please, do yourself a favor and read this book.