Lessons in Disaster is such a beautiful, finely crafted book that I feel kind of humbled to have been able to read it. It’s not a perfect book – it ends abruptly, it can be didactic, and I developed a love/hate relationship with the tendencies of all these intellectual characters to use words like ‘heuristic’ in the middle of emotional arguments. But overall, this was lovely.

The book tells the stories of two women and their relationships with their partners and with each other.

1. Jamie is struggling to teach and finish her dissertation. She is married to Ro. Also, Jamie is a witch, something neither Ro nor Serena knows.
2. Serena, Jamie’s mother, was married to Mae. They had Jamie together through IVF and had a loving relationship until Mae died of cancer.
3. Jamie is struggling to decode the queer elements of a novel called Emily, written by Sarah Fielding or perhaps Sarah’s close friend Jane Collier in 1749.

The story begins with Jamie deciding to tell Serena, who is nearly paralyzed by grief, that Jamie does magic. Jamie hopes that by teaching Serena how to do magic, they will grow closer and Serena will heal. But as we all know, mother/daughter relationships are complicated, and Jamie has no idea what Serena wants to use magic for or how Serena wants to use it. As Jamie and Serena work out their relationships with each other and with magic, we learn more about Jamie and Ro’s relationship and get flashbacks that take us through Serena’s marriage to Mae. Meanwhile we also follow Jamie’s journey of discovery as she searches for the true author of Emily.

Jamie and Serena are so well-drawn in their loveliness and messiness, together and as individuals. It’s fascinating to see how the family dynamics between Serena and Ro are paired with the dynamics between Jamie and Ro. I believed that they, Jamie and Ro especially, argue using heightened academic language only because these two people are steeped in academia (in Jamie’s case, since birth). I found it interesting the way this kind of language and habit of intellectual analysis could both serve to help them resolve differences and create/conceal/cover-up deeper feelings.

My husband and I went through a rough patch several years ago and although we are very different people than Jamie and Ro, this passage make me laugh and wince in pained recognition at the same time:

A few days after that, Serena was trying to bang out a Memorandum of Law for her class on how to write like a lawyer, and Mae asked if Serena had bought any milk. Without looking away from the screen, Serena said there was one way to find out. The next day, she and Mae had a completely pointless argument about whether Kathy Acker could be considered cyberpunk, or cyber-punk adjacent. (Neither of them was entirely sure how to define “cyberpunk” which made it worse).

I know that Tolstoy says that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” However, the evidence of this quote suggests otherwise as my husband and I had near-identical exchanges over and over again during our own rough-patch years, and we got through it in more or less the same way that Serena and Mae get through theirs.

There are so many threads and themes in this book that deserve their own essays of literary analysis – relationships between women, the changing ways that we describe and discuss queerness across generations, relationships between mothers and daughters, female and non-binary power, activism and resistance both from within and without the system, the erasure of women and of queerness in history, family trauma, sex work, and more. My only problem with this book is that, as evidenced by this paragraph, so much was crammed into it that any one theme or character could have encompassed an entire book.

As a child, Serena tells Jamie, “You will always be loved, you cannot mess up so badly that you will not be loved.” This sentence reverberates through the book, bringing a running thread of love, redemption, and forgiveness to the story. I found the book to be very moving on a lot of levels, and when it ended I wanted to go straight back to page one to read it all over again.