The Gretchen Question

Jessica Treadway is the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning author of the story collections Please Come Back to Me and Absent Without Leave (Delphinium Books), and the novels And Give You Peace, Lacy Eye, and How Will I Know You? She is a Senior Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston.

The Gretchen Question recounts a day in the life of Roberta Chase, who does not have much time left to make peace with the son who's punishing her for withholding his father's true identity. A single mother torn between protecting her only child or revealing herself fully to the people she loves most, Roberta finds herself at war with conflicting loyalties, the increasing betrayal by her own body, the confused love she feels for her oldest friend, and a trauma from her past that casts a deep and possibly permanent shadow not only over her own life, but over the legacy she will bestow upon her son. Portraying the most intense and even shameful moments of motherhood, and the things we leave unsaid even to those we want most to hear them, the novel is also a celebration of one woman's private reckoning with the source of her life's most profound pain?as well as its greatest pleasure.