| written by Alice Hause

Alice Hause is an avid reader and writer who likes to draw parallels between her favorite characters and her own experiences as a mother, sister, wife, daughter, and friend. Every month, she'll break down a favorite book, offering her life takeaways and thoughtful questions to spark deeper reading and conversation. This month, Alice explores the novel Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood.

My daughter. a first-year college student, came home at the start of her spring break. After indulging in home cooking, her favorite hometown restaurants, and the not-to-be-overlooked pleasure of showering without shoes, she headed out to spend the rest of her week off with friends. Despite the happiness we both felt, there was a sadness in my heart that made me think of what the character Grace Adams experienced. 

At the novel's end, Grace realizes something profound: She is losing her daughter to adulthood. “It’s like an epiphany—that she won’t ever be the mother of a baby or toddler. That part is over. It’s as though her life has shot forward while she was looking the other way, and there’s a grief in it that wrenches her soul,” writes the author, Fran Littlewood.

Many parts of Grace’s journey and struggles resonated with me, but none as strongly as that one. I experienced this exact feeling two years ago when my oldest child, my son, left for college. I knew that once he left, our family, a unit of four, would never be the same.

Like Grace, I felt like this part of my life had arrived overnight, and I wasn’t ready. The fact that I had 18 years to prepare for this was a mere technicality. I mean, how was my son supposed to start his day when I wouldn’t be there to say good morning? Or how could I fall asleep without sneaking in a hug at bedtime when he was too tired to wave me off?

In between my moments of grief, there were also moments of panic. Left to his own devices, would he make the effort to find fruits and vegetables? Was scurvy still a thing? Would he remember to separate his whites from his navy-blue sweatshirts?

I worried about all this, but thankfully, my daughter was still in high school and living at home, which helped immensely. I vowed to savor my time with her at home and impart all the essential adulting lessons I missed with my son. But as much as I fought, time found a way to shoot forward even though I wasn’t looking the other way. At her high school graduation, my immense pride was tempered by the tears I shed, knowing that I was no longer, and would never be, a parent of a high schooler. She was fast-forwarding toward adulthood. I mourned intensely. I love my son to pieces, but my daughter leaving was a new level of grief. Not only was I losing the baby of the family, but I was also losing my coffee, boba, and Pilates partner. These were vacancies my husband couldn’t fill.

I was a new person when I walked in the door after dropping my daughter at college. I was now the mom of two college-age children. I was now a mom with no children at home, left to rely on texts and phone calls to stay abreast of happenings in their lives. And because of that, I was the mom who slept with my phone ringer on… just in case. At the risk of making me sound extra paranoid, I was also the mom who checked Life360 before bed to make sure my kids made it back to their dorm or apartment safely.

I felt solace in reading about Grace’s journey with her daughter. Like her, I will get through this, by taking small steps and always moving forward. I will “shore up the edges when the grit spills from the side,” as it beautifully reads in the novel, by delighting in the phone calls I get while my kids are walking to class, living their lives.

I will get through this by moving steadily and purposefully, building a new path while moving forward as an empty-nesting mother of two young adults.

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Alice’s Take

Amazing Grace Adams begins on the most horrible, terrible, no-good day imaginable. Her husband has moved out and filed for divorce. Her relationship with her daughter, Lotte, has deteriorated to the point where they both keep secrets and lie to each other. After a massive fight, Lotte packed her bags and moved in with her father. Grace has reached rock bottom in her career. A gifted polyglot who was once a celebrated television personality, she has been fired from both of her lowly part-time jobs. And a thread running through all aspects of her life is her struggle with perimenopause. “It’s impossible to tell where the perimenopause stops, and she begins, and she’s asking herself who she would be if it wasn’t for these chemical enemies raging through her body, hijacking her mind…”

When we first meet Grace, she is stuck in traffic and stressed about making it to the bakery to pick up a special cake for Lotte. It’s Lotte’s birthday, and although Grace isn’t welcome, she is determined to make it to the party, put the cake in her hand, and win her daughter back. The confluence of all these factors pushes Grace to her boiling point, and she gets out of her car and walks away. As we follow Grace making her way on foot to the bakery and then the birthday party, the story unfolds in a non-linear timeline to show us how she arrived at this point.

Grace’s plight may not be relatable on all fronts, but I believe so many of us can find something that resonates. Perhaps it will be the various times in the novel where the culmination of things said or not said results in a sum so much worse than its parts. Or maybe it’s the guilt that Grace feels. “The universal mothering guilt that is surely implanted in the delivery room along with that Pitocin shot,” writes author Fran Littlewood. For many it will surely be the moments of brain fog where her once sharp and lucid thoughts failed her and when moments of sheer exhaustion and emotional outbursts overwhelmed her. 

Most importantly, hopefully, every reader will be able to find in themselves the very thing that makes Grace Adams so amazing. —Alice

Questions for Deeper Reading and Discussion

1. Grace is 45 years old. Some studies have shown that happiness is U-shaped–it bottoms out in your forties then starts to inch its way up again in your fifties. Do your own experiences or those of someone close to you support this study? How do you think our society as a whole marginalizes women over 40? 

2. Did you find Lotte a difficult character? Did you sympathize with her struggles or did you find her actions unreasonable? Were there aspects of Grace’s relationship with Lotte that you could particularly relate to?

3. At one point during Grace’s walk to pick up the cake , she encounters the woman who pays for a drink when Grace can’t and then bandages her blisters and scrapes. During their interaction, the woman tells Grace, “You’ve been in the wars.” And “I know you feel like no one see you.” Can what Grace is going through be seen as war? Menopause? Marriage? Motherhood? Have there been times when you have felt especially “seen” while going through these wars?

4. This novel is filled with themes of love, loss, hope, and grief. How did the intertwining of these impact your reading experience? What aspects of Grace’s story resonated with you the most on a personal level?

5. Amazing Grace Adams is the author’s first book. In interviews she talks about publishing her first book “in her mid-life space” and hope that this inspires people to realize it’s never too late to realize your dreams. Are you finding, or do you hope to find, the time to realize personal aspirations in your own mid-life space?

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