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'Monogamy' by Sue Miller Buy this book
It isn’t fashionable to call yourself a writer of domestic fiction — you’ll rarely catch male novelists describing their work as such — although Peter Geye surprised me recently when he said precisely that in our interview.
Domestic fiction, as novelist Sue Miller told me, seems to denote some kind of smallness, a lack of scope or ambition. And yet, those narratives of our most intimate familial relationships are the stories that some of our finest writers: Dickens, Austen, Kingsolver, Ng, Franzen, Allende, Lahiri, Patchett, Erdrich.
Miller’s new novel is a wonderful and absorbing domestic drama that is set, mostly, in the aftermath of the death of Graham, a larger than life presence in the lives of his wife and ex-wife, his children and the happy readers who turn up in his bookstore.
The novel examines the different paths grief takes among Graham’s loved ones and the shock of an uncovered secret in Graham’s life. In fact, Graham is alive and vibrant through the memories, the loss and the love of his friends and family.
In our interview, Sue Miller described experiencing the death of her father and knowing that she would — even after writing a memoir about the loss — return some day to weave it into a novel. It’s taken six years, but that novel, “Monogamy” was worth the wait.
My Thread Must-Read is Sue Miller’s “Monogamy.” Listen to my interview with her here. — Kerri Miller | MPR News | 