Elsey Come Home

September 15, 2018
A yoga retreat on a mountain in China signals a turning point for an expatriate American painter."About a year ago my husband handed me a brochure for a retreat in a nearby mountain village. We were standing in our Beijing kitchen while the girls played make-believe dog at our feet. The brochure was more like a handmade pamphlet--four pieces of white computer paper folded in the middle and stapled three times along the crease." Elsey's husband, Lukas, a Danish-born musician who plays electronic dance music in clubs, knows his wife desperately needs something to get her back on track and can only hope that this retreat will be it. Elsey's not so sure, but she goes anyway, leaving her beloved daughters with their dad and taking along a full cargo of emotional baggage. The conflict between parenting and painting has put an end to what was an art career on the rise and has also led to a dependence on alcohol that is more serious than she has been willing to admit. At the retreat she will learn plank and forward fold, observe a day of silence, and participate in the dreaded Talking Circle, which Elsey sees as a good premise for a skit on Saturday Night Live. Joining her on the mountain is a cast of Chinese nationals and foreigners, all there in hopes of changing their lives. Most significant among them is Mei, half of an internationally famous artist couple, for whom the retreat is an attempt to break from her difficult husband; she becomes something like a friend. As Elsey sorts through the memories of the yoga retreat and the year following, as well as older hurts and losses, Conley's (Paris Was the Place, 2013) slim novel illustrates the power of storytelling as a process for healing.What entices and endures here is the voice: dreamy, meditative, hypnotic, and very real.

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Starred review from October 15, 2018
Probing questions about how to balance motherhood, a career, marriage, and a drinking problem resonate throughout Conley’s excellent novel narrated by an American painter looking back on her past few years in China, which were mostly spent teetering on the verge of a breakdown. When Elsey’s Dutch husband, Lukas, suggests she attend a weeklong spiritual retreat, Elsey begrudgingly capitulates to save their crumbling marriage. But the experience isn’t as woo-woo as she expects. Instead, while learning to weather the dreaded “Talking Circle” and enduring the day of silence, she alternates between closing herself off from her emotions and ruminating on her demons, including the death of her younger sister when they were children, and her inability to “understand how to be obsessed with children and obsessed with painting at the same time.” Elsey also befriends Mei, an esteemed painter married to another esteemed painter, whose frankness about feeling trapped in a restrictive country and marriage gives Elsey perspective. Though Elsey continues to falter and obsess over past decisions after returning home, her growing ability to tackle previously insurmountable challenges (her daughter’s appendicitis, a visit to her childhood home, AA meetings, a return to painting) proves she is slowly learning how to “be a different kind of mother. A different kind of wife.” Conley (Paris Was the Place) hits the mark on a story line that feels both high-stakes and fine-tuned. But it’s the raw desperation of Elsey’s inner dialogue that elevates the novel, making for an honest and astute depiction of the human psyche.

December 1, 2018
American-born Elsey lives in China with her husband, Lukas, and two young daughters. Lukas' and Elsey's whirlwind relationship sparked after they met at one of Lukas' EDM concerts and now, years later, they have settled into parenthood. When Lukas encourages Elsey to attend a week-long yoga retreat in a remote mountain village, she realizes it is more than a mere ask. Her drinking has increased in frequency, and Lukas believes that time away is what she needs to stop and readjust. While at the retreat, surrounded by others on their own unique journeys, it isn't long before Elsey begins to mine her internal complexities and imperfections. She is wracked with current feelings of inadequacy as a mother but also finds herself conflicted about her past. Once a rising painter, Elsey left her artistic endeavors behind as her family grew, and her drinking became problematic. When she returns home, the consequences of her turmoil come to a head. Conleys' (Paris Was the Place, 2013) reflective, mesmerizing narrative crafts a compelling journey as her protagonist opens up to her vulnerabilities and truths.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2018

Author of the memoir The Foremost Good Fortune, an O, the Oprah Magazine "Top Ten" pick, and the debut novel Paris Was the Place, a People magazine Top Pick, Conley returns with a new novel carrying the poignancy and fraught scrape of relationships that characterized them both. In Beijing, expat Elsey's husband gives her a brochure for a weeklong yoga retreat, which seems less lifeline than ultimatum about their marriage. An esteemed artist, the disaffected, suddenly hard-drinking Elsey has stopped painting in favor of a desperate attachment to her children, and her adventures in yoga and thereafter are a way of trying to get back to her husband.

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