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Adult Onset, by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Free PDF Adult Onset, by Ann-Marie MacDonald
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From the acclaimed, bestselling author of two beloved classics, Fall On Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies, Adult Onset is a powerful drama that makes vividly real the pressures of life and love, and the undercurrents that run deep through even the most devoted families.
Mary Rose MacKinnon is a successful author of YA fiction doing a tour of duty as stay-at-home mom while her partner, Hilary, takes a turn focusing on her career. She tries valiantly to balance the (mostly) solo parenting of two young children with the relentless needs of her aging parents. But amid the hilarities of full-on domesticity arises a sense of dread. Do other people notice the dents in the expensive refrigerator? How long will it take Mary Rose to realize that the car alarm that has been going off all morning is hers, and how on earth did the sharpest pair of scissors in the house wind up in her toddler’s hands? As frustrations mount, she experiences a flare-up of forgotten symptoms of a childhood illness that compel her to rethink her own upbringing, her own family history. Over the course of one outwardly ordinary week, Mary Rose’s world threatens to unravel, and the specter of violence raises its head with dangerous implications for her and her children. With humor and unerring emotional accuracy, Adult Onset explores the pleasures and pressures of family bonds, powerful and yet so easily twisted and broken. Ann-Marie MacDonald has crafted a searing, terrifying, yet ultimately uplifting story.- Sales Rank: #346377 in Books
- Published on: 2015-04-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.90" h x 1.40" w x 5.80" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 400 pages
Review
Praise for Adult Onset
"[B]ig, troubling and brave…novel."
—New York Times Book Review
"[Adult Onset is] the most accurate description of solo parenting I've ever read....[MacDonald's] writing is dizzying and brilliant, and often disorienting, which beautifully supports the novel's themes, perfectly capturing how it feels to be unmoored and seemingly alone."
—Associated Press
"Riveting . . . MacDonald’s strong narrative is a compelling examination of the loneliness and the often-absurd helplessness of being a parent of young children."
—Publishers Weekly
“Ms. MacDonald strikes just the right tone as she exposes the brutal undercurrents of domestic life.”
—New York Times
"This is an affecting, multilayered account of domestic ennui and the painful effects of long-held secrets on three generations."
—Kirkus
"[F]ine, clearly detailed writing makes for an accomplished read..."
—Library Journal
"Ann-Marie MacDonald captures the dark hilarity of parenthood like nobody else. I gulped down Adult Onset in a single day."
—Emma Donoghue, author of Room and Frog Music
"A complex, troubling novel that cuts with surgical precision into the sinew and muscle of family life."
—Sarah Waters, author of The Paying Guests
“MacDonald fashions, after a 10-year hiatus, a novel impossible to put down once begun. . . . MacDonald . . . scans the parameters of parenthood with an unflinching gaze. Her depiction of the perils of everyday domestic turmoil can be harrowing as well as, at times, hilarious. . . . Since MacDonald’s books have all been so extraordinary, it is impossible to rank Adult Onset against the others. Suffice it to say the novel is superb, a fine blending of fact and fiction, of remembered incident and forgotten history, a wonderfully written treatise on the power of the past to impinge on the present.”
—Nancy Schiefer, The London Free Press (also in the Toronto Sun, Edmonton Sun)
“In basic factual terms, there is barely a playing card’s width between life and art in [Adult Onset,] an intricate, gripping novel that is also a master class in turning the personal into the universal through art.”
—Brian Bethune, Maclean’s
“Adult Onset is the third novel by Ann-Marie Macdonald. . . . The scene is set for a roller-coaster ride offering brief moments of serenity amid increasingly terrifying plunges into the darkness of Mary Rose’s past. Suspense builds; surely, horror awaits. . . . Macdonald’s book remains spellbinding throughout. It is impossible to forget, despite—or perhaps because of—an ending that leaves the reader exhausted and with no easy answers.”
—Paul Gessell, Quill & Quire
“Though all of Ann-Marie’s works are very distinct entities . . . her third book has the same beautifully crafted descriptions and character-driven storytelling that readers have come to love from the writer.”
—Jill Buchner, Canadian Living
“One of the remarkable things about Adult Onset is how viscerally and honestly it deals with the trials and tribulations of domestic life.”
—Adrian Chamberlain, Times Colonist
“One of the highly anticipated novels of the season is the latest from the award-winning novelist Ann-Marie MacDonald.”
—Joseph Planta, TheCommentary.ca
“If you’re of [an anxious] disposition, reading Ann-Marie MacDonald’s latest novel, Adult Onset, is both a blessing and a curse. It’s certainly an accurate depiction, and best described as exposure therapy—an exercise in committing yourself to multiple hours of low-grade anxiety, like walking into a crowded, sweltering room if you’re claustrophobic, wandering a fluorescent-lit hospital if you’re a hypochondriac, or travelling a long distance via air if you have a fear of flying. There’s an inexplicable sense of doom to overcome if you’re going to get through it, a looming spectre of disaster, even if all seems well on the surface as you turn each page. Adult Onset is MacDonald’s long-awaited third novel, following her highly successful blockbuster 1996 debut, Fall on Your Knees, and her 2003 Giller Prize shortlisted The Way The Crow Flies. . . . At its core, Adult Onset is about what happens when we are unable to face the physical and emotional pain of our past head on, and how the chronic illness of trauma will haunt even the most insignificant moments of our days. . . . It is a high achievement for a writer to portray the persistent worry of avoidance in a way than rings true, and MacDonald has beyond succeeded. It is in this sense that Adult Onset is both a book that is difficult to endure, and one worthy of our praise and attention. . . . Many of us will see ourselves in the profound discomfort MacDonald has conjured, and though the narrative lends itself to frustration as a result, the book is an absolute triumph of terrifying authenticity.”
—Stacey May Fowles, National Post
“Art imitates life in Adult Onset. . . . Tackling many heavy topics including miscarriage, depression, homophobia, and physical abuse, Adult Onset is an overall enjoyable read focusing on guilt, grief, memory, and family.”
—Carlyn Schellenberg, The Manitoban
“A stunning and powerful work that will knock readers on their collective keister. . . . Bold novel. . . . In Adult Onset, every character has depth, a story, nuance.”
—Ron Johnson, Post City Toronto
“Celebrated author, Ann-Marie Macdonald . . . is poised to return to the literary spotlight with her first book in more than a decade. . . . The multi-faceted author, actor, playwright, and broadcaster refashioned events from her own life.”
—Vit Wagner, Quill & Quire
“One of the most anticipated new fiction releases this fall.”
—Laura Eggertson, Toronto Star
“Scheduled to appear sometime this year, MacDonald’s Adult Onset is not yet being publicized; there is no cover or plot summary posted on the Random House Canada website or on Amazon.ca. It doesn’t matter. Her many fans, having read her first two books, the epic and masterful Fall On Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies, are waiting with bated breath for whatever the new book turns out to be. If Adult Onset is anything like the previous two novels it will be a marvelous, complex romp through recent history and current reality, crammed with memorable characters offering a stimulating view of the world.”
—The Rover (Montreal)
“Everyone is keeping a tight lid on what it’s all about, but I can guarantee you it’ll be a bestseller.”
—Brenna Clarke Gray, Book Riot (Adult Onset is one of “10 Reasons You Should [Re]Discover CanLit in 2014”)
“Adult Onset’s low simmer is a change of pace from MacDonald’s previous murder-mystery spy thriller The Way the Crow Flies, and literary debut Fall on Your Knees. . . . What remains, however, is MacDonald’s effortless ability to quickly spin pathos into humour, making the suffering of her characters humane and never heavy-handed.”
—Leah Golob, The Georgia Straight
"Suffice it to say [Adult Onset] is superb, a fine blending of fact and fiction, of remembered incident and forgotten history, a wonderfully written treatise on the power of the past to impinge on the present."
—The Toronto Sun
"A lively, moving, and often funny story that has the potential to help usher in a new era of honest literary depictions of families in all their permutations."
—The Walrus
"MacDonald’s book remains spellbinding throughout. It is impossible to forget."
—Quill & Quire
"In Adult Onset, MacDonald tracks what looks like a well-do-to creative-class person who is wrestling with a dark force, except in this case the menace is largely confined to the interior, a matter of memory and psychology. And she has again delivered a masterpiece."
—The Globe & Mail
"[Th]e book is an absolute triumph of terrifying authenticity. . . .Adult Onset is . . . worthy of our praise and attention."
—The National Post
Praise for Fall On Your Knees:
“In this resonant first novel… Ms. MacDonald skillfully shifts the story backward and forward in time, giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half-buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed.”
—The New York Times
“The uniqueness of MacDonald’s voice, and of her approach, lies in her ability to distill…She can capture, deftly, the fleeting moment, the fragmented feelings that make up so much of what we term ‘understanding’. Thus, complex experiences become single, vivid images. It is a rare talent that can produce it for others to see.”
—The London Times
Praise for The Way the Crow Flies:
"Remarkable...an engrossing, disturbing and layered tale."
—The Chicago Tribune
"One of the finest novels I've read in a long, long time."
—The Washington Post
About the Author
Ann-Marie MacDonald is a best-selling, award-winning novelist, playwright, actor, and broadcaster. Her works include Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Belle Moral: A Natural History, Fall on Your Knees, and The Way the Crow Flies. She lives in Toronto with her wife and their two children.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
MONDAY
Dreams of an Everyday Housewife
In the midway of this, our mortal life, Mary Rose MacKinnon is at her cheerful kitchen table checking e-mail. It is Monday. Her two-year-old is busy driving a doll stroller into the baseboard, so she has a few minutes.
Your 99 friends are waiting to join you on Facebook. She deletes it, flinches at another invitation to appear at a literary festival, skims her five-year-old’s school newsletter online and signs up to accompany his class to the reptile museum. She skips guiltily over unanswered messages and cute links sent by friends—including one from her brother that shows a fat woman whose naked torso looks like Homer Simpson’s face—and is about to close it down when her laptop bings in time with the oven and the incoming e-mail catches her eye. It is highlighted in queasy cyber yellow and bears a dialogue box: Mail thinks this is junk. She eyes it gingerly, fearing a virus or another ad for Viagra. It is from some joker—as her father would say—with the address ladyfromhell@sympatico.ca and in the subject line: Some things really do get batter . . .
A baking newsletter from a mad housewife? She bites, and clicks.
Hi Mister,
Mum and I just watched the video entitled “It Gets Better” and I thought I’d try out the new e-mail to tell you how proud we are that you and Hilary are such good role models for young people who may be struggling against prejudice.
Love,
Dad
PS: Hope this gets to you. Just got the e-mail installed yesterday. I am now officially no longer a “Cybersaur”! Off to “surf the net” now.
My goodness.
She types:
Dear Dad,
Congratulations and welcome to the twenty-first century!
No, that sounds sarcastic. Delete.
Dear Dad,
Welcome to the digital age! And thanks, it means a lot to me that you and Mum saw the video and that it means a lot to you that
She is proud that he is proud. And that he is proud that Mum is proud; of whom Mary Rose is also proud. Sigh. She does not like screens, convinced as she is they have some sort of neurologically hazing effect. She ought to write her father an actual card with an actual pen to let him know how much this means to her. She gets up and slides a tray of vine-ripened tomatoes into the oven to slow-roast—they are from Israel, is that wrong?
“Ow. Careful, Maggie.”
“No,” croons the child in reply.
She returns to the table, its bright non-toxic vinyl IKEA cloth obscured by bills and reminders for service calls she needs to book for the various internal organs of her house. Bing! Your 100 friends are waiting . . . A month or so ago she tripped on a root in cyberspace and accidentally joined Facebook; now she can’t figure out how to unjoin. She has visited her page once, its silhouette of a human head empty but for a question mark at the centre, awaiting her picture, like an unetched tombstone—we know you’re coming . . . eventually. Her unadorned wall was full of names, many of which she did not recognize, some of which bore the rank odour of the crypt of high school. What is this mania for keeping in touch? she wonders. Mary Rose MacKinnon is unused to continuity. She grew up in a family that moved every few years until she was a teenager, and each time it was as if everything and everyone vanished behind them. Or entered a different realm, a mythic one wherein time stopped, the children she had known never grew older and, as in a cartoon, people and places retained the same clothes and aspect day after day, regardless of weather, explosions or being shot by Elmer Fudd. She would not change a thing, however, each move having brought with it a sense of renewal; as though she had outrun a shameful past—starting at age three. Nowadays, she reflects, no one is allowed to outrun anything. If one kid slugs another in the park, they’re packed off to therapy.
Delete.
People used to joke about Xeroxed newsletters sent by relentlessly chipper housewives at Christmas. Their effect, and perhaps their purpose, was to make everyone who received them feel bad about their own lives. Nowadays people torture one another online with pictures of their golden-retriever lifestyles and tweets about must-see plays in New York with one-word titles, new restaurants in Toronto with four tables, human rights abuses in China and the truth behind the down duvet industry. Where is the meadow of yesteryear? Whither the sound of one insect scaling a stalk of grass? The time-silvered fence post in the afternoon sun? What has become of time itself in its expansive, unparcelled state, uncorseted by language? Where have all the tiny eternities gone? Gone to urgencies, every one.
As she types this e-mail to her father, icebergs are evaporating and falling as rain on her February garden, where a water-boarded tulip has foolishly put its head up—are things getting better or worse? Bing! Matthew is invited to Eli’s Big Boy Birthday Party! Click here to view your e-vite! A birthday party at some obscure suburban facility north of Yonge and the 401, do these parents have no compassion? She peers into the depths of info and goodies! trying to find a date and time amid exploding balloons and floating dinosaurs.
She used to console herself with the notion that the human species would burn itself out like a virus and Earth would recover Her bounty and diversity. But that was before she became a mother.
Nowadays? How old is she? No one says nowadays nowadays. She’ll be making references to the Great Depression before she knows it.
It is April, today is the first—though anyone might be forgiven for getting the months muddled considering it did rain all through February. She wonders if that impacted the usual February suicide rate. Impacted did not used to be a verb. Sometime in the nineties it got verbed, like so many other unsuspecting nouns.
Dear Dad,
I
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
I wanted more plot and insight, and fewer tedious details
By Rachel Edwin
This is a tough one to review. I haven't read the author's other books, but I can appreciate that she is a solid writer. That said, I really didn't enjoy reading this book. I had to read this for my Book Club. We haven't had the meeting yet. I tried to get through it as fast as I could and it was a relief to finish it. I would want to give it 2 1/2 stars.
The plot is about a week in the life of a middle-aged writer/mom of two who is overwhelmed while her wife is away in another city for work. She is struggling with the demands of domestic life while remembering her not-so-perfect parents who didn't really take care of her medical needs as a kid. The parents were also downright awful when she came out as a lesbian. And there are lots of flashbacks to her mom's miscarriages and stillborn kids.
The premise is kind of interesting and the characters are well-described. But there is A LOT in here about the humdrum of everyday domestic life that bored me to tears. I think that was the point of the book (how the struggles of raising kids can drive you crazy and remind you of your own childhood), but I found myself rolling my eyes at yet another description of yuppie-mummy struggles (e.g. "She uses non-chemical cleaning agents and washes all the fruit"; "just last week Mary Rose fitted the table with a shock-absorbent expandable table-edge bumper"; OMG, spare me the details).
There is a lot of repetition in this book. The protagonist (Mary Rose) has the same conversations with her parents over and over, and she has the same thoughts repeatedly. This is effective in alluding to possible dementia or the patterns we use to process/mask trauma, but again, annoying for this reader.
There are a lot of shout-outs to Toronto. Great if you are very familiar with Toronto. These little nuggets were pretty much lost on me.
Finally, I had an issue with Mary Rose's lack of insight and initiative. She's surrounded by emotionally intelligent and supportive people (her partner and friends - great characters, wanted to hear more about them!). Yet, she hasn't processed very basic stuff about her current life and childhood. The "revelations" she comes to near the end of the book are so obvious from the beginning that I was left asking, "what took you so long?" Mary Rose also has a lot of self-hatred and feels depressed, which can be hard to take as a reader. It's not fun being inside her head. I wondered: If you hate the tedium of the toddler years (which is perfectly understandable), you have tons of money, hire a full-time nanny! I found myself unsympathetic of this successful and well-to-do character who was martyring herself on the stake of mommy-hood for reasons I could not understand. Mary Rose is also a grammar snob which irritated me, but maybe other people can identify with this.
I would have loved to hear more about the period around her coming out. Those parts of the book were interesting and evocative. Also, I wanted to know more about the relationship between Mary Rose and her wife and friends.
This book would be great for people who identify with being a mommy to young children (and want to read about the daily routine in detail), those interested in repressed trauma, and readers who like a week-in-the-life structure. For those who prefer plot-driven books, find self-pitying yuppiness exasperating, or need their protagonist to be insightful, you should pass on this one.
I would still be interested in reading her other books, I heard that they're great.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Second chances?
By Friederike Knabe
"Whenever the past starting piling up behind Mary Rose, threatening to collapse, the family would move and presto, she would get another chance. She got good at being new. "
This time however, Mary Rose McKinnon, Mister as she has been called since her childhood, appears to be stuck. Taking a break from her successful writing career to look after household and her and her wife's small children, she cannot "just move" and start again when the many demands on her seem to overwhelm her. Running the household while her life partner, Hilary, is out of town for an important theatre production, is not Mister's only challenge, however. She is worried about her aging parents and there is concern that her mother may be developing dementia.
In her new novel, Ann-Marie MacDonald creates an intimate portrait of a middle aged woman at a crisis point in her life. We are close observers as Mister struggles through one challenging week, one day at a time. Written in the voice of Mary Rose and as a kind of memoir, the reader follows the protagonist's meandering reflections and recollections of present and past events. Like memory events are not recalled in linear fashion, one small irritation now triggers a circumstance in the past that suddenly grows in importance, raising more questions that need to be considered if not answered. It takes her (and us) a while to untangle the connections and the background to her current concerns. At times, Mister's behaviour becomes quite erratic and even friends and Hilary wonder about her mental health.
As a young child Mary Rose suffered from a 'bone cyst' in her left arm and required several surgeries including a bone graft to heal her arm. Suddenly now, she feels pain in that arm, but, so the doctors had assured her a long time ago, that her arm was totally healed. What to make of phantom pain if that is what she feels? Can it be triggered by long forgotten emotional trauma? In particular, she recalls the time when she was Maggie's age. But does she really remember what happened to her or does she piece stories together in her mind, stories that she heard from her older sister Maureen, of totally imagined scenes based on photographs she has seen later? Whatever the source, these memories are now coming back with a vengeance. Or so it seems to her. But why now? Does her behaviour towards Maggie mirror what she remembers of her mother's treatment of her at that age? There are suggestions to that effect. But is she - and we - correct in our assumptions?
Ann-Marie MacDonald is a very engaging writer. She captures the pace with which Mister is being bombarded with the daily challenges and upheavals very effectively. Her backstory, clearly inspired by her personal story provides much food for thought as well as questions about how parents behave towards children which does not necessarily match how the grown-up children later perceive and understand that behaviour. Yet, this is not a novel that will appeal to every reader in the same way or to the same degree. It will depend on their own experiences in life. While I enjoy non linear stories, I found the narrative flow at times too interrupted, and not only by Mister's childhood memories. Another deep-seated pain from her young adulthood takes over her mind and emotions. It has overshadowed her relationship to her parents ever since. Furthermore, the protagonist interleaves chapters from her successful YA novel. Each narrative thread is relevant for the whole, but it takes time to work out the connections for the week in question. Having heard the author read from the beginning of the novel, I discovered the funny side of her writing more directly than by reading it quietly to myself. [Friederike Knabe]
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
MacDonald is a really good writer but she gets caught in the trap of ...
By Paige Turner
Does not meet the high level of achievement of her earlier books - mind-numbing mundane domestic detail and a lot of angst. One wonders where/who the grown-ups are.
MacDonald is a really good writer but she gets caught in the trap of her own clever word play - to what end? A little goes a long way in developing a stream-of-consciousness; repetition can alienate the impatient reader, and I am probably one.
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