The Mother-in-Law Diaries

Starred review from January 4, 1999
Candid, irreverent, funny and poignant, Dawson's fourth novel (after Dancing with the Minotaur) takes a fresh look at marriage and other social customs through the eyes of an engaging heroine. "Serial marriage is a kind of path, a continual fumbling toward love and commitment honorable intimacy," concludes protagonist Lulu Penfield at the end of her "diaries," basically a long letter to her son, Treatie, who has just announced he is married. Lulu's attempt to instruct her son on the grave responsibilies of matrimony results in a soul-searching recital of her own four trips to the altar, the shortcomings of the men she wed and her relationships with their mothers. Her account, spanning from the 1970s to the present, becomes a trip through the sexual revolution as experienced by a woman from a middle-class Texas family whose traditional expectations are at odds with real life. Lulu--feisty, restless and questing--is an appealing narrator who readily admits her propensity to make the same romantic mistake each time. Mark Brune is her Dallas high-school sweetheart and lasting love; she marries grad student Ted Vonick on the rebound and lives in Austin. Subsequent marriages follow: to a biologist in Palo Alto, Calif.; to an artist with whom she lives in London and his native New Zealand; and to a Berkeley journalist and reluctant stepfather to Lulu's three boys. Poor Lulu tries to make each marriage work, but her intelligence and sharp eye for the foibles of her husbands and their mothers (each of whom is a real piece of work) does not grant her self-knowledge. It takes Lulu half a lifetime to understand important truths about human nature and to appreciate at least one of her former mothers-in-law for the "magnitude of her heart." When Lulu finally achieves insight about her sad marital record, it is to ruefully admit that she has been "acting out the paradigm for an entire culture." Meanwhile, the reader has bonded with an endearingly fallible heroine and traveled with her on a distinctive but also universal quest for happiness. Author tour.

November 1, 1998
A tangled, and often dark, musing in the voice of Lulu, whose eldest son, Treatie, at 21, has just married. In contemplating the act that made her a mother-in-law, Lulu traces the women who have had the most effect on her life: the mothers of the men she has loved and/or married. Lulu's ties to those women, and what she learns from and is given by them, are what raises this novel above the done-me-wrong school of multiple marriages. There's Treatie's father Ted's mother, whose household hints mask a sweet, solid love for Lulu and for her grandson. And there's Declan's mother the witch, whose voodoo doll is an old Raggedy Ann. Throughout, Lulu addresses herself to her son and limns the circle of sensuality that holds what is bad for us. Finally, we meet Lulu alone, a successful writer, and see her demons slain (mostly). Sex may be at the core of what makes us human, Lulu seems to say, but it is the mother-child dyad that makes us real. ((Reviewed November 1, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)