Mass Mothering

"A. is a translator, adrift and burdened by medical debt. She spends her days caring for a young boy who is not and could never be her own. Her nights are spent on the dance floor, chasing the high of oblivion. At a late-night dive, she encounters N., who shares her anguished state and sometimes her bed. Among N.'s meager possessions, A. comes across a slim book about an unnamed foreign town of disappearing boys. Unfinished, the book, Field Notes, documents the testimonies of a community of mothers who gather to mourn their missing sons and dance with their images. A. is transfixed by the mothers' collective chorus of primal grief, by their steely strength, and by their intuitive care for each other. When a near-assault stuns A. out of her inertia, she takes off for the city where Field Notes was written, in search of its author and the end of his story. But A.'s digging leads her instead to the traces of a murdered poet, a woman whose legacy of love and courage dispels the shadow of unspeakable crime. Poignant and profoundly humane, Mass Mothering is told through layered voices, written fragments, and recorded testimonies. It is a story of exile and grief, of the aftershocks of violence in a globalized world, of cause and complicity, and of the life-affirming resistance of documentation. In luminous, sinuous prose, Sarah Bruni ultimately reveals what matters most: the world-bending force of the love of mothers"-- Provided by publisher.

Sarah Bruni