Like Mother, Like Mother: A Novel

“a fun immersion into the lives of a loving, well-meaning, smart, and interesting set of people who readers will want to root for.”

Like Mother, Like Mother is about more than the grandmother, mother, and daughter who are the focus of its three sections.

It sweeps in a richly populated world where “family” can include a best friend’s mother and grandmother, plus that friend’s high school English teacher’s husband, although maybe not a central character’s actual mother. Despite the huge cast, the characters don’t blur together. They are vivid, complicated human beings, even if their emotions are too often announced instead of plumbed.

The world of this novel spins around the Maier-Pereira family of Detroit and Washington DC, and in particular around the middle mother, Lila Pereira—because everything, inevitably, spins around Lila.

Lila and her older siblings Clara and Polo were raised by their abusive father, Aldo, in working -class 1960s Detroit after he committed their mother, Zelda, to an asylum for the mentally ill, where she supposedly died. The day she left home for the University of Michigan, “Lila stole back her mother’s jewelry” from Aldo’s mother, gave most of the pieces to Clara and Polo, “and turned her back.”

From there, Lila carved her way up to a powerful role as executive editor of the (fictional) Washington Globe newspaper, which seems more or less based on The Washington Post. Charismatic and driven, Lila brings down a Trump-like president with an investigation into widespread corruption.

Her marriage to Joe Maier, an easygoing lawyer and General Motors Co. heir, is a love match of opposites. Joe is the primary parent for their daughters Stella, Ava, and Grace.

As the novel begins, Lila has “died on the front page of The Washington Globe” from a sudden onset of Stage IV lung cancer. Less than a year earlier, Grace had published what became a bestselling debut novel, entitled The Lost Mother, that is widely seen—including by Lila--as thinly veiled auto-fiction.

Among the discomfiting problems with this thin veil is that the Lila figure in that book has an affair with her publisher. Also, the Zelda figure abandons her marriage and children, rather than being committed to an asylum and then dying.

The book is written that way because Grace is convinced, or possibly half-convinced, that “Zelda didn’t die back in 1968.” As she tells her best friend, Ruth, “Her story is the origin story of our family. Everything follows from her escape” from the miserable marriage. Lila had to believe that Zelda was dead, Grace says, because “Lila could hold out against Aldo’s violence but not against his violence and Zelda’s desertion.” Grace, however, feels compelled to know the truth.

The writing in Like Mother, Like Mother trots easily along, and the last 50 or so pages are almost impossible to put down, as Grace finally sets herself to uncover Zelda’s secret, if she can. 

At times, however, the story verges close to fairy tale territory. Success and fortune keep dropping into the extended family’s hands, while the villains are over-the-top bad.

For instance, Lila’s early rival at the Globe isn’t merely jealous and less talented; he also lied about his resume, cheated on his expense account, plagiarized some of his news stories, and sexually harassed several colleagues.

One of the best aspects of this novel is that, even though much of it takes place in the fraught world of journalism, it’s actually an escape from today’s headlines. It’s a fun immersion into the lives of a loving, well-meaning, smart, and interesting set of people who readers will want to root for.