Daughter

In Claudia Dey's Daughter, a woman long caught in her father's web strives to make a life--and art--of her own.

To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.

So says Mona Dean--playwright, actress, and daughter of a man famous for one great novel, a man whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona's childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, her father begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights--painfully, parasitically--in this attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father's crimes and ejected from the family.

Mona's tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss--one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements--can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.

Claudia Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humor. Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create, and to break free.

Author: Claudia Dey
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 09/12/2023
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 7.50h x 5.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780374609702


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2023
Publishers Weekly 08/07/2023
Booklist 08/01/2023 pg. 19

About the Author
Claudia Dey's novel Heartbreaker was a Paris Review Staff Pick; a Goop Book Club Pick; a Globe and Mail, BuzzFeed, and CBC Book of the Year; and a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. Her plays have been produced internationally and have been nominated for many awards, including the Governor Award. Dey has written for The Believer, McSweeney's, Literary Hub, Hazlitt, and The Paris Review. She is the co-founder and co-designer of the clothing label Horses Atelier.