The Shame
Alma is a stay-at-home mother and homesteader in rural Vermont. She spends her days feeding sheep, making homemade maple syrup and hot sauce, constantly stoking the wood stove, and shuttling her small children back and forth to school. The monotony of her days and the invisibility of her role begin to build inside her, and soon she finds herself driving through the night toward New York City and the promise of a different life.
When Alma arrives in Brooklyn, she knows she will find what and who she is looking for — Celeste, another mother whose online presence has captivated her.
Written quietly but with a powerful voice and keen attention to the minutiae of domestic life and the mirage of online fame, The Shame is the kind of novel that sneaks up on you.
Quote:
”I go over the details again and again of the things I’ve done wrong, and when I’m hovering over them like a drone, replaying the moments where I tripped up, where I failed, I start to feel better. Because I’m important. It’s me, after all, who keeps the trains running on time. It’s me who makes dinner, who is in charge of no one drowning in the bath, who washes up, scrubs dried egg off the edges of the table, scoops dead flies from the corners of the windowsill with the sponge.
Sometimes, though, I wonder if my children really love me. I think, from a place that feels rational, that they just need me. Then I think that maybe it isn’t even need at all but an addiction. That if they ran out of their supply of me, they’d have symptoms of withdrawal, but then the need would vanish. Or the need would come back, but it could be satiated by something, or someone, else.”
Author:
Makenna Goodman is an American editor and writer. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Harvard Review, The White Review, Catapult, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. The Shame is her first novel.
Published: 2020
Length: 146
Main Setting: Vermont, U.S.
Secondary Setting: New York City, New York, U.S.