I recently had the pleasure of reading Sarai Johnson’s debut novel, Grown Women. Set across rural Tennessee and Washington, D.C. from the 1970s to the present day, the novel follows four Black women – great-grandmother Evelyn, grandmother Charlotte, mother Corinna, and daughter Camille – and how the relationships between them change as they themselves do. More specifically, it examines how each mother messes up raising her daughter, and how they pin their hopes of redemption on the success of young Camille. Johnson succeeds in that magic possessed only by great writers: of writing a story true to the specific life its characters, characters who might be very different from you, who you nevertheless see parts of yourself in. The four women at the heart of the novel themselves go through this: despite being blood-relations, they could scarcely have a more varied set of personalities and outlooks, but you get to share in their joy and small triumphs as they find paths to understanding and empathizing with each other. Johnson’s prose underlines these differences among its characters, not just in dialogue but also in the composition of entire chapters, each of which is told from the third-person perspective of one of the four.
Grown Women handles the depiction of trauma better than most other works, even works I otherwise like. It is not a novel that revels in the misery of its characters. Their problems are neither self-invented in the way that many introspective novels frustratingly fall into, nor are they so extreme and unlikely as to descend into bathos and unintentional comedy. Every bad decision a character makes is understandable in light of what we know about them, or learn about them later. Fundamentally, Grown Women treats its characters with real love and affection. It never overlooks their faults, but understands that they can change, improve, forgive, and be worthy of forgiveness; in short, it believes that people can grow. That is an important message, and one the novel delivers beautifully. In the most unforced way, the novel touches on numerous other themes that time and space do not permit me to recount. I will simply say that Grown Women is worth your time, if for no other reason than that you will have such a good time reading it.
