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I read Jo Walton's My Real Children for book club last month, which many people who know me in real life now know because I briefly acquired a bad habit of going around saying things like "well, I've made my decision and ideally it won't accidentally lead to nuclear war!"
My Real Children follows a woman named Patricia Cowan through two alternate timelines: one in which she marries a dude named Mark when he asks her, and one in which she doesn't.
Personally, marrying Mark is definitely a mistake, because Mark is an asshole -- which is not to say that Trish's life is miserable forever because she made a mistake, but, you know, there's a significant period of misery time in there. On the other hand, the world in which Trish marries Mark is, on a global scale, significantly better than the world in which Pat dumps Mark and finds True Love with a woman (Bee) and a city (Florence) and is generally very happy with her personal choices; Pat's world is even more deeply messed up than our current one, in a hundred small and large ways that do and don't affect Pat and her overall wonderful family life. How exactly these changes to world history have come about is not necessarily clear or obvious.
In both worlds she has children, and loves them, with some complications.
(In the Pat-and-Bee world, the father of their children is a secular Jewish guy who said a couple things that made me put the book down and side-eye it for a minute -- "I'm Jewish, of course I speak Hebrew;" dude, you are a secular Jew! in England! there is no 'of course' there! -- but this is a relatively minor caveat.)
Mostly it's a relatively straightforward narrative of two different lives lived differently, by someone who starts out as the same person, but is arguably not by the end. Sad things happen, because sad things eventually happen in every life. There are small tragedies and large tragedies, and people get old, and people die. Things are terrible for some people and don't affect others. A whole city gets wiped off the map, but if you're not in the country where it happens, then, I mean ... it's sad, but you get on with things .........? (Which is the sort of thing Jo Walton has always excelled at, how it's possible to live a perfectly normal life around fairly terrible things.)
I read the end of the book as implying the necessity of a choice between the two worlds and lives, and I did not like that and wished it was not necessary. Other people argued that they did not read the ending as requiring a choice at all, that 'the person her life had made her' had to be both Trish and Pat at once. Which I like much better, but I don't know if it's what I actually think the book is doing.
My Real Children follows a woman named Patricia Cowan through two alternate timelines: one in which she marries a dude named Mark when he asks her, and one in which she doesn't.
Personally, marrying Mark is definitely a mistake, because Mark is an asshole -- which is not to say that Trish's life is miserable forever because she made a mistake, but, you know, there's a significant period of misery time in there. On the other hand, the world in which Trish marries Mark is, on a global scale, significantly better than the world in which Pat dumps Mark and finds True Love with a woman (Bee) and a city (Florence) and is generally very happy with her personal choices; Pat's world is even more deeply messed up than our current one, in a hundred small and large ways that do and don't affect Pat and her overall wonderful family life. How exactly these changes to world history have come about is not necessarily clear or obvious.
In both worlds she has children, and loves them, with some complications.
(In the Pat-and-Bee world, the father of their children is a secular Jewish guy who said a couple things that made me put the book down and side-eye it for a minute -- "I'm Jewish, of course I speak Hebrew;" dude, you are a secular Jew! in England! there is no 'of course' there! -- but this is a relatively minor caveat.)
Mostly it's a relatively straightforward narrative of two different lives lived differently, by someone who starts out as the same person, but is arguably not by the end. Sad things happen, because sad things eventually happen in every life. There are small tragedies and large tragedies, and people get old, and people die. Things are terrible for some people and don't affect others. A whole city gets wiped off the map, but if you're not in the country where it happens, then, I mean ... it's sad, but you get on with things .........? (Which is the sort of thing Jo Walton has always excelled at, how it's possible to live a perfectly normal life around fairly terrible things.)
I read the end of the book as implying the necessity of a choice between the two worlds and lives, and I did not like that and wished it was not necessary. Other people argued that they did not read the ending as requiring a choice at all, that 'the person her life had made her' had to be both Trish and Pat at once. Which I like much better, but I don't know if it's what I actually think the book is doing.
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I hope you don't mind that that inclines me to read the book more than anything else I have ever read about it, including Jo's posts.
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It did not stress me out because it happened in the middle of a very enjoyable conversation which may someday wind up on the radio, but on Saturday I found myself explaining that while it took me two weeks in college to learn how to chant Torah and I can read a three-thousand-year-old Semitic language written in cuneiform, my knowledge of the actual Hebrew language is almost entirely confined to prayers and the one modern Hebrew verb I know is לטרפד, which is quadriliteral because it's a loanword and means "to torpedo," which explains why I remember it.
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I can transliterate Hebrew letters, and I took two semesters' worth of the language in college, but only about five words of actual understanding have stuck to the present day.
The other thing that jarred me was the bit where one of Pat's kids asks their dad if him being Jewish makes them Jewish (after, if I remember right, he's expressed a wish to be buried in a Jewish cemetary), and his response is basically 'nope! your mother isn't Jewish which means there is nothing Jewish about you! never think about it again!' and they all laugh and do, in fact, never think about it again. Which, I mean, is technically accurate, but TO ME FELT WEIRD.
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I try to be educational!
'nope! your mother isn't Jewish which means there is nothing Jewish about you! never think about it again!'
Okay, look, maybe Judaism is blanket matrilineal-only in the UK [edit: nope, it's not], but in the U.S. bilineal descent is recognized by both Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism and either way maybe Israel will give you tsuris for it, but that's not the same thing as a judgment of total irrelevance to one's life and/or family traditions. Let me join you in feeling weird!
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IIRC, there's a bit in Among Others where Mori's Jewish paternal grandfather does the same nope, you aren't Jewish explanation. I think she actually thinks about it, afterwards? I don't know if that bit is actually supposed to be autobiographical about Walton, but it seems plausible.
Also it's set in 1980, when things might have been different, and I think the grandfather was just individually observant, not part of a synagogue or anything.
(My father was a secular Jew, and I was raised to think of myself as half-Jewish, and didn't actually learn about the matrilineality thing until I was 13 and someone on the internet "explained" to me that it wasn't actually possible to be half-Jewish.)
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It's been a while since I've read it, so I might be misremembering, but the paternal grandfather is a very unsympathetic character, isn't he? Honestly, I don't find it implausible as a thing that a person would say or think, under certain circumstances. But it feels incredibly jarring to me, the idea of excluding your kids from that part of their heritage that way -- like the wicked child in the Four Questions, you know, 'what does all this mean to you' -- and the utter casual-ness of this conversation left me staring at the book like 'but isn't Michael supposed to be sympathetic, isn't he meant to care about these kids? Why does he think this has nothing to do with them?'
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I haven't read the book since it first came out, but here is my comment from a Making Light spoiler thread:
In my own reading, I was immediately convinced that Patricia chooses Trish's world. Trish, the antiwar activist, would choose it. Pat, the woman who loved the world and the people in it, would choose it. I think even Bee, given the choice between a loving family and a better, safer world for herself, would choose it. A better world for everyone is more important, given the way Pat and Trish and Bee live their lives, than a better world for Patricia alone.
The other half of what I've been thinking is that it's not at all clear that Pat's life is a better life than Trish's. Certainly Trish is miserable in her marriage, and in the early chapters after the split, I was hating Mark hard and waiting for Tricia's chapters to end so I could see the awesome things Pat was doing. But Pat's intense joys, in her work, in her love for Florence, in her love for Bee and Michael and their family, are countered later in life by equally intense sufferings. Pat first takes care of Bee after her injury from a terrorist bomb, and then sees both Michael and Bee through their deaths from post-nuclear cancers that would not have happened / do not happen in Trish's world.
Pat arrives at the nursing home suicidal with grief; her children have saved her life, but she's lost her caretaker and her love. Trish arrives at the nursing home reluctantly -- she's been able to take care of herself up to this point with the help of found family, grandchildren and Internet access.
So in the last years of their separate lives, Pat suffers and Trish finds fulfillment, in a neat reversal of Pat's earlier fulfillment and Trish's earlier suffering.
One life isn't better than the other -- except in the effects of war. I'm sure, in my own heart, that Patricia chooses Trish. What happens then, as Patricia's life story iterates again? I don't think I quite need to know. The choice is all.
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I did like the question of a better life in a worse world versus a worse life in a better world. It's similar to a question I've thought of a lot, which is whether I'd rather live in an ideal world in which my existence doesn't matter in the overall scheme of things (because it's already ideal, there's nothing I can do to improve it) or in our actual world, in which so much is wrong that my (or anyone's) actions will always make a difference if you choose to do right, and the only question is by how much.
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http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/443835.html?view=9262779&posted=1#cmt9260731
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(I like her writing! Lots of the middle was very good! But aaaaagggghhhhhh.)
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And my mind went in a totally different direction, because I read the reference to the city of Florence and instantly thought, "What, she moved to the Oregon coast?"
Because there is, in fact, a town called Florence out here on the Oregon coast, and I of course went there before recalling that *other* Florence halfway across the world in Italy.
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I felt by the end of My Real Children that I was being forced to sit through a series of those family Christmas letters people send out, and a lot of the character short-hand this involved really didn't work - isn't there a nephew somewhere whose mother used a nanny and so the only other character points you get are a) turned into a bull and b) died, relatively unmourned, which seemed pretty harsh. But I love the idea of having a good life in a bad world versus the alternative.
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Walton is one of those authors, like Stephen King and Diana Wynne Jones, whose books are so different that liking or disliking some doesn't necessarily predict how you'll feel about others. I feel bad for the people who really just don't like them as authors and won't like any of their books, because they may have to read four of them to be sure of that.
Whereas with most authors if you read one or two books that fans consider both typical and good and you dislike them, you just don't like that author. Like, if you dislike Going Postal and Hogfather, Terry Pratchett is just not for you. I thought I didn't like his writing for ages, but it turned out that I had made the mistake of reading Color of Magic and a Rincewind book, the first of which is widely disliked and atypical, and the second of which any fan could have warned me that Rincewind is more of a specialized taste. I was eventually recced Small Gods with that explanation, and it turned out that mid-period Pratchett is one of my very favorite authors. Minus Rincewind.
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And yeah, there is definitely a weird misapprehension on the part of a lot of people (including Stephen King iirc) that all Jewish people speak Hebrew, possibly as their first language? Which ... no, most of us in diaspora really, really don't.
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Honestly, if I was given a choice between having perfect knowledge of Hebrew and perfect knowledge of Yiddish, I might pick Yiddish? Not that I'm ever likely to actually have either!
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