My Amazon and Goodreads review of Take What You Need by Idra Novey (Rating 5) – It’s Complicated. I was hooked at the book’s first line: “This morning, I read that repeating the name of the deceased can quiet the mind when grieving for a complicated person.” Take What You Need by Idra Novey is the story of a difficult relationship, told from the alternating perspectives of Leah, a young woman, and her recently deceased stepmother Jean, who left when Leah was ten and from whom she is estranged. Jean is a magnetic character who inspires both admiration and distaste, an artist obsessed with sculpting massive towers (“manglements”) which she welds from scrap metal, old photos, and other salvaged materials. Jean literally dies for her art, falling from a ladder while reaching for the top of one of her towers. Leah travels to the tiny, decaying house and town in northern Appalachia where Jean was born and died, trying to come to terms with the disruption between that first decade of love followed by sudden abandonment. In Jean’s back story, readers hear her aching need to restore their connection and the multiple ways in which Jean, an artistic visionary with emotional blind spots, repeatedly screws up every attempt. We also discover, along with Leah, that in mourning those with whom we had an uneasy relationship, we can come to acknowledge the good without invalidating the bad. Jean had an open heart that invited everyone, even society’s castoffs, to take what they needed, while being insensitive to the person who needed her most. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I applaud Novey’s ability to draw characters who are at once unlikable and sympathetic. As one among many who have struggled with ambivalent feelings about those we’ve have lost, I appreciate how Take What You Need gives grieving readers permission to let conflicting emotions dwell alongside each other.
A journey to resolve conflicting feelings for the deceased
Why writers read: “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.” – George R. R. Martin
