Sarah O'Connor

“To be loved by your father is to be loved by God,” (Dey 17).

Despite everything, Mona Dean can’t stay away from her famous writer father Paul Dean. Not when he left her mother and sister when she was eleven, not when he ignored the abuse his new wife, Cherry, dealt against her and her sister as children, and certainly not when he wants her in his confidence to tell Mona that he’s fallen in love with another woman. Mona loves being in her father’s orbit, until Paul goes back to Cherry and tells her that Mona has always disliked her. Turned into the scapegoat, her father’s second family vilify her and her half-sister has now cut off contact. When Mona experiences an unexpected loss, she may finally be able to learn what real love looks like.

It’s hard to describe what makes Claudia Dey’s Daughter as good as it is. The language she uses is simple, and while a lot happens in Mona and her relatives lives Dey focuses more on the inner workings of her protagonist and other characters then on what is happening around them. The paragraphs are long and sprawling, starting off with Mona before suddenly becoming about her, who Mona is to Paul, to Cherry, to her husband Wes before shifting her back into focus. One Goodreads reviewer described the novel as a fever dream, which I think is an accurate descriptor. At times it felt like a one-woman show, which I’m sure was intentional considering that Mona is in the process of writing and performing a play called Margot based on Margaux Hemingway. The book, in many ways and parts, is a monologue from Mona, simply told but with a depth of emotion expressed even if there isn’t an actual performance taking place.

The book is about daughters and their relationships to their parents, the different roles daughters have in their parents lives and how the only apparent escape seems to be becoming a parent themselves. The book will make you angry at times, with Paul and the ways that men can use women. It will make you angry at women, at the way Cherry competes for Paul’s affection with herself and her daughter, Eva, at Mona who seemingly takes Paul’s abuse in their codependent relationship and lets her elder sister fight on her behalf while silently observing the fights. There really are no winners when it comes to these characters, but despite their flaws, they’re intriguing. Dey shows reader’s the inner psyches of her characters so we can understand why they do the things they do, not to empathize or excuse, but to understand their inner workings. They are people, flawed, like all of us.

Daughter is a masterful work, sure to resonate with quite a few readers but still be loved and appreciated by those who don’t have the same type of father as Mona Dean. I can’t wait to read more of her work!

Publication: January 1st 2023
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Pages: 272 pages (Hardcover)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Literary, Canadian
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:

To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.
So says Mona Dean—playwright, actress, and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona’s childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights—painfully, parasitically—in this attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father’s crimes and ejected from the family.
Mona’s tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss—one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements—can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.