Book Nook: The Long Answer

 

An uncannily intimate, deeply empathetic, and truly spellbinding reading experience, THE LONG ANSWER lays open emotional dynamics around female friendship, sisterhood, and grief, fueled by women’s shared experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.

Anna Hogeland wrote her debut novel, THE LONG ANSWER, while she was searching for a narrative, any narrative, about the journey to motherhood and her struggles with pregnancy, that could meet her in her grief and show her how to transcend it. She spent long days digging through the library and message boards, speaking to friends and loved ones, and realized how intimately and urgently she needed to hear other’s experiences and how it was still so rare to hear them collected together. With reserved, translucent prose reminiscent of Sigrid Nunez and Rachel Cusk, Hogeland shares a version of her story, and the story of so many who are pursuing motherhood, in THE LONG ANSWER.

 

 The novel is told from the perspective of Anna, a woman pregnant with her first child, who finds that she is a magnet for private, tender stories of the women around her. This makes for an intimate and spellbinding reading experience. The beating heart of THE LONG ANSWER is the exploration of how women directly impact each other with the stories and feelings they share.

Incisively written and deeply empathetic, THE LONG ANSWER lays open emotional dynamics around female friendship, sisterhood, and grief, fueled by women’s shared experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.

About the author:  Anna Hogeland is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School of Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. She lives in Vermont.