My Real Children

March 31, 2014
Jo Walton’s My Real Children is a bit like a novel written from the point of view of Schrödinger’s cat, except that instead of a cat we have a smart, sympathetic Englishwoman named Patricia, and she’s not alive and dead, she’s alive twice—she lives two parallel lives, in two distinct worlds, both of which are apparently equally real.
While the premise of My Real Children is science fictional, its tone is that of literary realism. Patricia is born in 1926, but when we first meet her she’s almost 90 and in a nursing home, where her confused memories of two different pasts are taken as a symptom of senile dementia. Patricia isn’t so sure. “It was just that things were different, things that shouldn’t have been different,” she thinks. “She remembered Kennedy being assassinated and she remembered him declining to run after the Cuban missile exchange. They couldn’t both have happened, yet she remembered them both happening.”
In 1949, shortly after she graduates from Oxford, Patricia receives a marriage proposal from a pushy suitor named Mark, a devout Christian. In the life where she says yes, Mark and Trish (as she’s called) wind up in a terrible, loveless union; she’s a stoic, philosophical soul and a devoted mother who eventually gets involved in local politics. In the other life, where Patricia goes by Pat, she turns Mark down and later has a loving partnership with a woman named Bee and a joyful career writing travel guides. Walton tells both stories in the same even, unfussy tone: no matter how well or badly things go for Pat or Trish, the narration remains observant but calmly, coolly distant.
The fortunes of the wider world flop the opposite way. Pat lives in a world of nuclear exchanges and rabid intolerance. Trish’s world chooses peace and international cooperation in space. (Each world is recognizably related, but not identical, to our own.) Comparing the two, Patricia is forced to wonder: did her choice split not just her own life, but the history of the entire species? Do we all possess that power, and the responsibility that comes with it?
My Real Children has as much in common with an Alice Munro story as it does with, say, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. It explores issues of choice and chance and destiny and responsibility with the narrative tools that only science fiction affords, but it’s also a deeply poignant, richly imagined book about women’s lives in 20th- and 21st-century England, and, in a broader sense, about the lives of all those who are pushed to the margins of history: the disabled, the disenfranchised, the queer, the lower middle class. My Real Children is a quiet triumph, not least because whatever life Patricia happens to be living at any given moment, she remains deeply and recognizably herself. Good novels show us a character’s destiny as an expression of who they fundamentally are. What most novels do only once, My Real Children does twice.
Lev Grossman is the book critic at Time magazine and author of the forthcoming novel The Magician’s Land.

April 1, 2014
Walton (Among Others, 2011, etc.) creates an engaging fictional biography of one woman's life lived two different ways. It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is "very confused," or so they write on her charts in the nursing home. It's true that she has had dementia for years, but sometimes her room seems to have navy blue curtains and sometimes pale green blinds. More puzzling, she is sure she remembers two distinct sets of children. Both visit her, but they don't share a reality; they're from the two different lives she entered when she made the choice to marry, or not marry, Mark, when she was a young woman. The novel travels back to Patricia's childhood, a fixed narrative, and then begins alternating chapters to follow the split. In one life, she marries Mark and becomes Tricia, an obedient wife and mother of four children. In the other, where she is Pat, love and children come later, after she's established an ardor for Italy and a satisfying teaching career. In both, Patricia is an inspiringly open-minded, grounded, active woman, and it's a pleasure to watch her adapt to her circumstances as the novel swings her through time. Her rights and role as a woman shift depending on the choice she made, but that choice is accompanied by larger changes in the world around her as well. Unsettlingly, neither landscape is quite recognizable. Midcentury touch points develop in unfamiliar ways--concerns regarding nuclear power and its misuse loom large for Pat, whereas the International Space Station on the moon becomes a marvel to Tricia. Both lives have their share of affecting triumphs and tragedies, with the themes of family and partnership woven evenly throughout. Walton is a straightforward, unsparing writer, and she strikes a poignant balance between the ideas of agency and fate. Science fiction elements add an eerie complexity to these deeply felt portraits.

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April 15, 2014
Every life has pivotal turning points at which a single decision can change the whole course of a life. In 1949, Patricia Cowen's boyfriend asks her to marry him. Yes or no? One life or another? In a fascinating opening scene we meet Patricia living in a nursing home and suffering from dementia but remembering both possible lives she might have experienced. In one, she is called Trish, marries Mark, and has four children but an unhappy marriage. In the other, she goes by Pat, doesn't marry Mark, but meets Bee and finds love and happiness. Patricia not only has unique accomplishments in the two lives, but the world she inhabits is completely different, making this personal story into a low-key alternate history as well. VERDICT Walton ("Among Others") is a beautiful writer although the very linear narrative of Pat's and Trish's marching along in tandem sometimes feels like a laundry list of life milestones. The subtle nature of the "what if?" could make this book a hit with literary fiction fans who enjoyed Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life".

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