MILF

The novel centers on Linda Daczinski, a middle-aged mother, wife, graduate student, and daughter who is simultaneously confronting a marital crisis, the return of an old lover, severe perimenopause, financial danger, the pandemic, and the question of whether the life she built is actually the life she wanted.

The story begins in early 2020 when Linda travels from her new home in the Hudson Valley to the West Village after being urgently summoned by her mother, Belinda Daczinski. Linda is the daughter of the late Hank Daczinski, a celebrated photographer, and Belinda, a glamorous Hong Kong-born former supermodel and soap actress who has spent decades surrounded by celebrities, luxury goods, younger boyfriends, and the conviction that ordinary rules do not apply to her. Linda initially fears that Belinda may be ill. The actual emergency is financial. Belinda has accumulated roughly half a million dollars in IRS penalties after failing to pay taxes, has invested heavily in a dubious Macao real-estate scheme promoted by her brother John, and has already remortgaged Norland, the converted West Village factory building where Linda grew up and where Hank’s preserved photography studio remains. Linda is horrified because losing Norland would mean losing the physical center of her family’s history. Against her better judgment, she agrees to find money to help, concealing the situation from her husband, Bran.

Linda herself is attempting a midlife reinvention. Almost twenty years earlier she began graduate study at Cambridge but never completed her doctorate. Now, after years spent largely parenting daughters Margie and Edie, she has enrolled at Gerd College to restart her academic life. Her research subject is the cultural figure of the MILF: how society sexualizes mothers and older women while simultaneously punishing female aging. The project is unusually personal. Linda feels trapped between the expectation that middle-aged mothers remain sexually desirable and her own growing sense that marriage, motherhood and time have rendered her invisible.