Made By Mary
When Mary and Ann agree to a surrogacy partnership everything goes awry. Ann, a pre-school teacher, is desperate for the children she physically can't have. Mary, a 50-year-old pagan jeweler, hopes to make amends for years of maternal neglect. Together, they plunge into the expensive, morally complex world of reproductive technology and an intimacy neither they, nor Ann's husband, Joel, is prepared for. Financially hard-pressed, Joel goes behind Ann's back and agrees to help Mary grow a marijuana crop in her attic. Ann struggles with the rigors and enforced togetherness of the reproductive regime. And Mary's delight in being a "bountiful earth mother" is offset by the physical ordeal of bearing multiple fetuses. The stakes escalate as the police start sniffing around the grow house, a pagan ritual goes tragically awry, and the pregnancy becomes more perilous, forcing Ann, Joel, and Mary to confront the potentially calamitous consequences of pursuing their deepest desires. Sharp and audacious, Made by Mary is a black comedy using magic realism to blow up myths about women, mothers, and motherhood, where even the most extreme situations are rendered with candor, intelligence, and empathy.
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"Laura Catherine Brown is a gifted writer, unafraid to take risks and plunge into
di; cult emotional terrain. You can't help but root for her fl awed characters as they
stumble through the broken world, struggling to realize their dreams. Made By Mary
is a wise, tragicomic exploration of the complex ties of family, with a little bit of
magic thrown in."
-- HILLARY JORDAN, author of Mudbound and When She Woke
"A suspenseful and surprising book fi lled with magic, mothers and daughters
unusually entwined in a search for new life; all told in a believable voice, with
precisely conveyed detail, and dialogue which conjures up a plethora of characters
searching for love."
-- SHEILA KOHLER, author of Dreaming for Freud, Once We Were Sisters, and Cracks
"A wry and compassionate novel about that most inextricable of relationships--
the mother-daughter bond. In Mary, a jewelry-making, pot-growing, goddessworshipping
hippie, who claims that she birthed her daughter at Woodstock,
Brown has created an indelible and unlikely heroine. About our tenderest sacrifi ces,
and our fi ercest desires, Made by Mary is a generous book, and a wise one. Brown
understands that, between a daughter's debt, and a mother's due, there is a whole
territory of resentment, love, fury, devotion, and mutual incomprehension."
-- KATHERINE MIN, author of Second Hand World
"Made by Mary is a jaunty read about the way we live now. The way we get born, and
reborn, and surrogately born. The way we make fun of our foibles and fads without
losing sight of what is eternal and earnest: the desire to sustain the species, to love
our family no matter how it came to be, no matter how it spirals into the infuriatingly
silly or the inimitably sublime. To honor the mysteries of the universe even as we are
imperfect in understanding them, yet always always making exorts in that direction,
hilariously, devoutly, with heart, and without cease."
-- ANTONYA NELSON, author of Funny Once, Nothing Right, and Bound
"Excellent with dope deals, lovers lesbian and otherwise, surrogate motherhood and
the unforgettable character of crystal-toting, never-grow-up Mary, Laura Catherine
Brown's Made By Mary is deeply moving. The repercussions of Woodstock have never
been so wisely and vividly examined, nor the spectacle of maternal love sonogramed
so well between generations."
-- TERESE SVOBODA, author of Tin God and Bohemian Girl, and Pirate Talk or Mermalade
