my mother's lovers

joy passanante

  My Mother's Lovers  is about a mother and daughter in the Northwest and their connections to the mother's Jewish-Sicilian family. The principal setting is a fictitious mill town in northern Idaho. The protagonist, Lake Rose Davis, is the only child of East Coast hippies who move to Wilders Ferry, Idaho, in the late Sixties to escape the Viet Nam War and the pressures of resisting it. But the bulk of the novel takes place 20 years later. It details Lake's adventures as the unhappy offspring of eccentric parents: her mother is a free-spirited painter of female nudes; her father, a distracted bookstore owner. Obsessed with her mother's loves and alienated by the small town, Lake precociously explores her own sexuality and reenacts in her own life what she believes are her mother's extramarital liaisons.

Interview with Lance Olsen