Louise Erdrich and Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan and Elizabeth Strout: these are some of the writers whose stories about parenting, and being parented, stand out in my mind. Claudia Dey’s fiction could be included here, too, although her stories spiral around alienation and abandonment—the ways in which those who could be the central figures in our lives inhabit other roles, either from the beginning or over time.

When her debut, Stunt, was published, I was intrigued by the Toronto Island setting. Before moving to the city, I’d been fascinated by Gwen MacEwen’s time there (witnessed through Rosemary Sullivan’s biography Shadowmaker—outstanding) and, after moving, the Islands became a favourite place. I was working closely with a woman who lived on Ward Island, which added a layer of interest, and Dey’s story about a fractured family wasn’t far off my experience as a child of divorce.

Stunt, overnight, comes into a different understanding of how people connect (and don’t): her father has left and her mother was never really there. It’s appropriate that Stunt’s story is told in clear, concise prose: each word distinct, as though in relief, against a backdrop of abandonment. But Stunt didn’t take hold of my imagination and I returned my library copy unfinished: two-thirds or three-quarters read. (Maybe I planned to reborrow and finish, but I didn’t.)

Stunt’s nine when her father leaves, but the story is more concerned with the impact of that absence on her later life and the impact of her mother’s priorities—which don’t include the kind of parenting that Stunt needs, especially when her father’s just gone poof.

All of this is also true of Claudia Dey’s new novel, Daughter (2023), except that Mona’s father never goes very far, her mother is a different kind of unavailable, and readers don’t witness Mona’s childhood directly.

“Paul deserted me when I was eleven, and I had modelled my view of myself in response to that desertion. And Paul kept leaving me over and over again.”

What Mona means is that she keeps believing he’s capable of being a different kind of father, and Paul keeps being the same kind of father he’s always been.

There’s no sentimentality or heavy emotion; she writes (the novel’s divided into five parts—classic drama) in such spare prose that we must read between the lines to feel Mona’s profound sense of loss, sparked by recent events but always spiralling back to these early days of being disregarded.

Paul is a writer. (Stunt’s father felt a vocational pull too—there’s no question that the wider world values these men, regardless of their capacity to nurture relationships in their lives.) “When your father exits the frame, you start to think, I must not be enough.”

He’s famous for a book he’s written called Daughter, but Mona isn’t his only daughter, and there are differing opinions about which daughter inspired the book. As things unfold, there are also differing takes on how that book was written (during the time he was married to Mona’s mother). And he expresses differing ideas about its inspiration. (And ideas about where the responsibility lies for the turn his career took afterwards.)

“Paul apologizes to me from behind a fictional father,” Mona thinks, at one point, during a conversation. But readers know that Paul isn’t apologising. He’s saying something and Mona’s desperate to hear another thing.

Readers recognise the same inconsistencies that Mona observes (for instance, about the genesis of Daughter); there’s no question that explanations Paul offers on one day differ from explanations offered on another day. But readers also recognise that what Mona imagines hearing when Paul speaks doesn’t reside in his words. He does not say what she hears.

Mona has good relationships in this book, so the story isn’t wholly devastating. Her partner has complicated feelings about Paul, too, after he doesn’t receive genuine advice or support about his own artistic leanings; he supports Mona in her struggle to connect with Paul and reassures her that there’s a massive gap between Paul’s private and public personas. And it’s particularly moving when her best friend (since girlhood), Ani, supports her in a tough time: “And then she said, you don’t have to say anything, but just stay on the phone.”

Here, readers hear about the inaccessible side of Mona. The part where Mona doesn’t say anything. Ani knows this about her, articulates it, leaves a space for it even. Dey’s characters often aren’t capable of expressing the very elements that could acclimatise readers to these stories. And because the narrative is structured so simply, readers aren’t immediately alerted to the fact that there’s something more beneath the surface. (This might be what I missed in her first novel. I also missed what some readers consider elements of comedy and whimsy—apparently also present in her second novel, Heartbreaker, too, and her playwriting.)

Similarly, Mona doesn’t articulate the growth she experiences over the course of the novel (titled, you’ll have noticed, the same as her father’s published novel). Perhaps it’s spoilery to admit that there is growth.

But the sense of loss and sorrow is unrelenting: other family relationships also being thorny (multiple perspectives revealing refracted layers of hurt and disappointment), an assault in Mona’s past (which further ignites her yearning for a relationship with a trustworthy man), as well as Mona’s traumatic experience of divorce, and the ongoing—and ineffective—attempts to navigate this territory after everyone’s reached adulthood.

It’s all so heavy that I feel it’s essential to suggest there’s some hope at the end.

“When I was a girl, his voice was a net and it held me,” Mona says. She wants us to believe that, at least, she now understands what release looks like.

I planned to write about two other books today, one I finished (the collection Chrysalis by Anuja Varghese) and one I’ve not (I thought I’d finish on the weekend, but Erin Bow’s Simon Sort of Says captured my attention instead—thanks to Rebecca U. for this rec). But it took longer than expected to write about Daughter.

The 2024 longlist transforms into a shortlist tomorrow, but that doesn’t influence my reading; longlists (and submission lists) intrigue me most when it comes to prizelists.