Anne Bogel

Like 19th, 20th century?

Yeah.

I would like to jump in with a book that I haven't talked about on the podcast, but I feel like I've been talking about a lot lately because we just hosted the author Sarah Johnson in Book Club.

But that is Grown Women by Sarah Johnson.

And this is a debut.

It's a multi-generational family saga that doesn't feel entirely unlike some of the issues we see in Ellen Montgomery, but this does not have a balance of heavy and light.

There's not as much light to outweigh a lot of heavy.

This is very much about the ghosts of the past and how they haunt us, both in the form of just embodied generational trauma.

But also there is a very specific literary ghost I'm going to tell you about in a moment.

So this is a depiction of four generations of Black Southern women.

The story takes place in Atlanta, Nashville and surrounds, and D.C.

predominantly.

And how they interact with each other as mothers and daughters.

Some of the mothers know they're terrible mothers.

Some of the mothers know they received bad mothering and want to do better by their daughters.

Their attempts to correct and do better by their daughters sometimes backfire, sometimes don't succeed at all, sometimes cause harms that they did not remotely foresee.

But it starts when we see the second generation fall.

fleeing Atlanta, where she's clearly left behind a life of at least financial privilege, to arrive in Nashville to start a new life with a soon-to-be daughter that we know she does not want to have.

But she has decided to have.

And in the next 300-something pages, we learn more about why.