Jun 20

Jun 20 The Long Answer

Author: Anna Hogeland
Publisher: Riverhead
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

A woman considers pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships in this profound and provocative novel.

Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna's own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the children they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in.

The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.

TL;DR Review

The Long Answer is an emotional, sad, beautiful novel of stories within a story about pregnancy, motherhood, and grief. It begs not to be rushed but flows like water.

For you if: You like to cry, and you don’t mind relatively plot-less books.

Full Review

Thank you, Riverhead, for thinking of me for this book and sending it my way — you were right, I loved it. The Long Answer is a sad, beautiful, deeply personal book of stories within a story.

Our narrator, who shares the author’s first name, is an MFA student expecting her first baby. The book begins when her sister calls to tell her that she’s had a very early miscarriage. That serves as a jumping off point for her to tell Anna about her best friend’s recently revealed past. In the next section, a young woman from Anna’s prenatal yoga class tells Anna her story. And so on — as Anna’s own difficult journey unfolds, she comes to nearly collect women’s stories about children they had, or didn’t have, or couldn’t have, or wished they’d had.

Somehow, this book manages to be absorbing but also unhurried; it flows like water but begs not to be rushed. Especially as you hit the halfway point, which rings like a gong and redirects the river more directly into your heart. I found myself completely absorbed in each woman’s story, forgetting, temporarily, that we were inside another novel. And after each one ended, my appreciation for this novel grew. The structure and stories here illuminate the deep, universal connections between women forged by pregnancy, motherhood, and grief. It’s about many parts of womanhood that people don’t talk about, yes, but also so much more than that. It’s also about sisterhood (literal sisterhood, like with her sister), which was another element I loved.

I am not a mother, nor have I attempted to become one, and yet this was still very emotional and deeply resonant. It will likely be a difficult read for many, but I imagine it could help release locked-up portions of a heart as well.

Thank you, Anna Hogeland, for giving us so much of your heart so generously.