with a particular interest in the transition to parenthood and is working toward her doctorate in clinical psychology. She lives with her son in Berkeley, California.
Goldstein-Love applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Possibilities, and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Yael Goldstein-Love's website.“What gets called ‘mommy brain’ is really just selective attention,” Ash went on, ignoring, as usual, the general unease she was creating among the other women in the group. “Which is actually, when you think about it, another name for intelligence. We are always selectively attending. Deciding what to filter out from our sensory data, from our cognitive data. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to function at all. We’d be absolutely flooded with all the information coming in. Concentration? That’s just good filtering. New mothers filter better than other people. But we filter for the safety of our offspring, which means filtering out things that aren’t relevant to keeping our offspring safe. Mommy brain, if you insist on using the term, should be a compliment.”On page 69, a character takes a familiar phrase (“mommy brain”) used to casually dismiss and belittle mothers and casts it in a new light, revealing it as a potential strength rather than an obvious failure. This gets close to my overall aim which was to take an aspect of motherhood used to denigrate mothers and turn it inside out to show the courage and strength hiding in plain sight.
“That’s an interesting point,” I said.
I was looking down at Jack eating a piece of lint he’d picked off the letter R, the jauntiest in the rug’s alphabet ring. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to reclaim my time and finish my check-in. So far the sum total of what I’d said was, “I’m having a very weird time today. You know the phrase mommy brain?” There was a whole lot more I’d meant to say, but I didn’t really have the energy and actually, Ash’s angry speech was probably the highlight of my day so far. She had been warned several times in recent weeks about this tendency to make speeches and thereby eat up other people’s time, but personally I found her speeches both informative and relaxing. I didn’t know what I hoped to accomplish by sharing anyway. I’d been so pleased when I remembered, right after finally picking up my lorazepam prescription from CVS, that I had my mother’s group coming up at 4 p.m. Driving down Telegraph, feeling the whole evening yawning open, just me and Jack, and then: A place to go! A place with other people, people who could speak. But being here was only making me feel lonelier.
But a browser would get a pretty lousy idea of what the overall reading experience would be from this excerpt. The page sounds like it comes from a book of straight realism about new motherhood. In fact, The Possibilities explores the psychological experience of becoming a mother by whirling readers through spacetime and multiple layers of reality in a sci-fi thriller. (It also pains me a little that page 69 reads as didactic when, in the overall context of this scene, it’s a moment of comic lightness.)
But, in a way, I love the misdirection here and what it says about the way the book is constructed. In order to get at aspects of human psychology that I think otherwise go unseen, the book makes use of a sci-fi metaphor – imagine that at the moment of birth the laws of nature briefly change so that different realities not only exist side-by-side but also affect each other. In the book, my protagonist’s child disappears from his crib at eight months old and people start forgetting him one by one – the cops who responded to the kidnap call, even his own father. It’s up to his mother alone to find him and save him, which is complicated because this involves traveling to alternate realities. You can read the book for the adventure story alone, but you can also read the whole thing as a psychological metaphor, and I think when you do that you actually go through some of the wildness of becoming a new mother on a visceral level.
--Marshal Zeringue
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