“It’s…nice.” Max didn’t sound like he meant it. He hadn’t picked Vista View—that would be Alice again. We were standing a few feet from the entrance, watching a fake waterfall trickle over fake river rock, trying to work up the resolve to go inside. Upstairs, movers were arranging what remained of my furniture without me, but I couldn’t seem to get past the forecourt.”
That’s from the beginning of chapter two of Laurie Frankel’s novel, Enormous Wings. After a minor fender bender, the children of seventy-seven-year-old Pepper Mills took her license away and moved her into a retirement home in Austin, Texas.
She was expecting to be miserable but, in fact, made several new friends and found a new love, Moth. Shortly after Pepper and Moth began spending time in bed together, Pepper started feeling poorly. Her children took her to the doctor expecting some dire diagnosis only to be told that Pepper was, in fact, pregnant. At seventy-seven!
And so began months of deciding what was the healthiest decision to make, and who gets to decide, especially living in an anti-abortion state. And once the media found out about this medical miracle, plenty more people hounded Pepper for a variety of reasons—like to be their poster child or use her blood for medical research.
The author uses this extremely rare phenomenon to address, as the book jacket says, “female agency and bodily autonomy, morality and mortality. It’s about what happens when you don’t get to choose. It’s about motherhood and family, sex and love and friendship, and how those bedrocks—even so late in the day—can still change, and then change everything.”
If you’re interested in this unique scenario, then you must read Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel.
