03/26/2018
This affecting autobiographical novel from Griffith (Hild) recounts a proud and independent woman’s struggle to lead a meaningful life despite a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Mara Tagarelli, the executive director of the nonprofit Georgia AIDS Partnership, is still dealing with her wife’s ending their 14-year marriage when she gets the shocking news that she has relapsing-remitting MS, which is exacerbated by stress. After Mara circulates a budget with some inappropriate language she includes by accident, she’s asked to step down from her position. Suddenly with too much time on her hands, Mara uses her familiarity with big pharma’s misleading advertising to determine what medication might actually benefit her. A bad experience at a support group for people with MS leads Mara to create a new organization, the Cripples Action Team, “a flexible task force with an active, evolving mission to help disabled people help ourselves.” While a subplot involving crimes against the disabled could have been dispensed with, the end product is a plausible warts-and-all portrayal of a person unwilling to let herself be defined by her illness. Anyone who’s ever struggled with medical adversity will be inspired. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Company. (May)
"A compact, brutal story of losing power and creating community . . . So Lucky is beautifully written, with a flexible, efficient precision that embodies the protagonist's voice and character." —Amal El-Mohtar, The New York Times Book Review
"A short, fast-paced whirlwind of a novel . . . Spine-tingling and in places downright terrifying" —The Independent (UK)
"A narrative that at once informs, confronts, puzzles and engages. I have little doubt that readers who take it up will be rewarded." —Lambda Literary
"This book is a body-slam of empowerment, a roar of frustration so sustained and compelling that it cannot be ignored... a tough, accomplished novel, a book that readers didn’t know they needed." —The Arts Fuse
"A fresh and powerful novel and antidote to the sense of victimhood." —Booklist
“So Lucky is somehow both a tense psychological thriller and a subtle character portrait, packed full of pleasure (so closely observed) and pain (so deep, so real). Nicola Griffith is an essential writer, and with this book she's given us something personal, political, and totally unputdownable.” —Robin Sloan, author of Sourdough
“All too often, stories glide past issues of the body, as if our minds operated suspended in air above us, as if everything we experience doesn't come through our physical selves. But what happens when our relation to our own body turns adversarial Successfully disguised as a page-turning thriller, So Lucky is also a deep meditation on marginalization, vulnerability, and resistance.” —Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club
“In So Lucky, Nicola Griffith replicates the actual experience of becoming disabled. This genre-violating story begins straightforwardly then slides into a hallucinatory exploration of the body, reality, and identity. It is disorienting, destabilizing, and game-changing. I have never read anything like it.” —Riva Lehrer, artist and curator
“Nicola Griffith is a brilliant creator of fierce female protagonists. With So Lucky, she fires a gritty, scary, wrathful, sometimes blisteringly funny broadside at the monsters of ableist culture.” —Maria Dahvana Headley, author of The Mere Wife
“In Nicola Griffith's So Lucky, Mara is a vibrant, active, social justice minded woman stalked by a phantom. The phantom threatens her work, her relationships—nothing less than her identity. This angry, funny, cleverly-written piece about the onset of disability in a world that values fitness above all ushers in a new wave of disability story. Or let’s hope so.” —Susan Nussbaum, author of Good Kings Bad Kings
“Nicola Griffith's So Lucky is compelling reading, a tour de force of the onset of disability. This is the first novel I have read that describes an autobiographical experience of disability from Day One with a relentlessness that can parallel disability itself. It is intense, sad, and dramatic, combining mystery, romance, terror (internal and external), and hope. Just like life itself.” —Steven E. Brown, Co-Founder of the Institute on Disability Culture
2018-04-03
A narrative of disability and its consequences.An author of science fiction, thrillers, and historical fiction, Griffith (Hild, 2013, etc.) defies easy categorization. So does her latest novel. It has some of the elements of crime fiction, but its shape does not conform to the genre's norms. Romantic relationships play a significant role in the plot, but this is certainly not a romance novel. This is, more than anything, a story about disability and how it shapes—and reshapes—people's lives. The narrative begins with Mara Tagarelli's longtime partner, Rose, leaving her for another woman. When Mara turns to Aiyana, one of her oldest friends, for comfort, their relationship turns sexual. But Aiyana's job is taking her to New Zealand, so Mara is alone when she discovers that she has multiple sclerosis. As both the illness and the side effects of drug therapy take their toll, Mara is forced to step down as executive director of a multimillion-dollar AIDS organization. Her experience in that space gives her tools for advocating for herself and other people with MS, but her failing body challenges Mara's sense of herself. She's used to being strong and self-reliant, and now she is weak and dependent. She doubts that anyone can really want her. She is prickly about Rose's offers of help, and she assumes that Aiyana has lost interest. Then MS sufferers on a mailing list Mara has compiled become the victims of violence, and she suspects that the perpetrators might be working their way toward her. There are plenty of compelling themes here, and this might have been an excellent novel if it had been half again as long. But everything feels rushed. Mara's reaction to her disease is raw and honest, but readers only see her as caustic and difficult. Unpleasant protagonists can be compelling, of course, but, here, it's easier to understand why Rose and Aiyana would ditch Mara than to understand why they stick with her. And the element of mystery is introduced late and resolved before it generates any real tension.Original but disappointing.
