Author Event: Yael Goldstein-Love
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
1:00PM - 2:00PM
Location: Congregation B'nai Shalom & Online by Zoom
What if the life you didn’t live was as real as the one you did? Hannah is having a bad day. A bad month. A bad year? That feels terrible to admit, since her son Jack was born just eight months ago and she loves him more than anything. But ever since his harrowing birth, she can’t shake the feeling that it could have gone the other way. That her baby might not have made it. Terrifying visions of the different paths her life could have taken begin to disrupt her cozy, claustrophobic days with Jack, destabilizing her marriage and making her husband concerned for her mental health. Are the strange things Hannah is seeing just new-mom anxiety, or is something truly weird and sinister afoot? What if Hannah really did unlock a dark force during childbirth? When Hannah’s worst nightmare comes true and Jack disappears from his crib, she must tap into an extraordinary ability she never knew she had in order to save him: She must enter different versions of her life while holding on to what is most important to her in this one to bring her child back home. From the intimate joys of parenthood to the cosmic awe of the multiverse, The Possibilities is an ingenious and wildly suspenseful novel that stares down into the dizzying depths of maternal love, vulnerability, and strength.
Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of the novels The Passion of Tasha Darsky, described as “showing signs of brooding genius” by The New York Times, and The Possibilities, a speculative thriller about the psychological transition to motherhood. A PEOPLE pick of the week (“a powerful page-turner with deep wisdom”) and Good Morning America recommendation for summer reading (“taps into those primal feelings every nurturer feels — and fears”), The Possibilities grew out of Goldstein-Love’s own rocky transition to motherhood as well as her clinical passion for working with people during this fraught and potentially generative period. Her doctoral dissertation examined how mothers experience their anxiety for the unknown futures of their children. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and Slate, among other places. A graduate of Harvard University and The Wright Institute, she lives with her six-year-old son and a very patient cat in Berkeley, CA. In another life, she was co-founder and Editorial Director of the literary studio Plympton, which aims to make the digital age a golden age for literature.