Last year I read Jo Walton’s Among Others, a lovely book about a Welsh teen’s magical coming-of-age in the wake of her twin sister’s death. I thought that book was quietly bold, so I looked into Walton’s other work and marked My Real Children for priority investigation. And happily My Real Children was at my local library (yes, this is another “my local library” post).
In this book, Walton unfurls an entire human life, twice. The novel’s protagonist is Patricia (sometimes Pat, sometimes Trish), a British woman born early in the 20th Century. Late in life, confined to a nursing home due to dementia, Patricia discovers a strange divergence in her memories: she remembers two completely different lives. In one life, where she is nicknamed Trish, she marries her college boyfriend and he proves to be an extremely typical awful 1950s husband. In another life, where she is nicknamed Pat, she falls in love with a female botanist and becomes a successful travel writer. And yet despite the obvious disparity in those premises, it’s not so easy for Patricia to say which life she wants to be real, if she can only choose one.
For one thing, she has several children in both lives and will not say that she loves her four children with dismal Mark any less than she loves her three children with scientist Bee. Her experiences mothering all seven of these children provide the structure that defines her adulthood and the love that sustains her.
Moreover, the world itself is profoundly different in these timelines. Though Trish’s personal life smothers beneath her husband’s cruelty, around her a stable socialism-tinged peace extends over the globe, science and diplomacy surging ahead to support a successful international moon colony. And while Pat luxuriates in familial and romantic contentment, multiple nuclear exchanges during the 20th century drive many nations into hard-right turns darker than the ones we’re experiencing IRL.
These developments seep into Walton’s narrative not through a direct engagement with foreign affairs or international politics, but through the daily details of Patricia’s life. My Real Children is a deeply materialist novel, attending closely to the moment-by-moment, year-by-year activities that accrete into Patricia’s life. When Pat and Bee wish to have children together, Walton relays their quest through its logistics: their investigation of IVF, their selection of a suitable father, and the physical mortification of pregnancy and birth. When Trish discovers second-wave feminism after years of marital unhappiness, her ideological development expresses itself in the changes she makes to her daily life, the meetings she joins, the friends she makes, an expansion of horizons once curtailed by marital expectation.
Not every reader will enjoy this approach. Walton’s unflinching commitment to the material and quotidian marginalizes the more straightforwardly science fictional story elements, and the “reason” or “explanation” for the doubled timeline is never revealed. The book’s pacing is relentlessly rhythmic, metronoming back and forth between timelines in several-year chunks, getting faster and faster until Patricia’s nearly out of time. There’s no obvious a-ha punchline at the end of Patricia’s lives (there’s not gonna be one for your life either, but many people are uncomfortable hearing about that).
All this is critical to the feminist ends towards which Walton writes. She offers the book on the predication that everything hinges on Patricia’s answer to Mark’s marriage proposal, but this is sleight of hand skillfully carried out. Though the timeline splits at this point, Trish going with Mark to be married, Pat going off unmarried to meet Bee, there is no indication that this split is responsible for the other divergences in the timeline. Mark amounts to nothing in either timeline, so his marital status is not the pivot point on which nuclear war hangs. Bee makes tremendous contributions to botany in both timelines, whether Pat is there to support her or not. This decision, held up as the central moment of the book, does not affect the world outside Patricia and her children, all of whom grow up to be very average people who do little to affect the flow of history.
Like so many women, Patricia’s whole world is reduced to the decision to marry a man or not. The book sets us, the readers, up to buy into this idea, at least at first. After all, this is the point of divergence! This is the core of the multiple timelines! We need to get the Infinity Stones so we can go back and make sure Patricia makes the right choice! (Which is?)
As her lives go on, we see that in so many ways Patricia’s decision about marriage is less significant than we’ve been led to believe. Pat’s family life with Bee is happier than Trish’s, but Trish actually has a much richer life outside the home as she becomes involved with feminist and environmentalist politics. In both timelines Patricia’s mother, and then Patricia herself, slide slowly and inexorably into dementia. In both timelines, Patricia experiences horrible heartbreak, disappointment, and loss. In the end, both sets of her children consign her to a miserable senescence in a nursing home.
Through these timeline rhymes, Walton paints a truly astute, intelligent, and complex picture of women’s struggles using the second-wave feminist frame which corresponds with Patricia’s lifetime. Mid-century feminist theory highlighted clearly how women are so often the prisoners of social and historical forces, constrained by the expectation that their lives only matter in the context of who they marry and mother. Patricia does not escape these expectations. She is not the most active or heroic protagonist, not the masculinist hero who Makes His Own Destiny through the power of having always had all the options. But Walton’s loving attention to Patricia’s life in all its mere and minor aspects reveals her as a true, whole person, doing her best to create an endurable life out of the circumstances built up around her. Moreover, Walton subtly upends the expectation that men will be active agents in their Heroic Singular lives. The most significant men in both of Patricia’s lives are humiliated by chance and history, made miserable playthings of infirmity long before Patricia is.
Walton employs the multiple timelines of My Real Children to reveal an urgent and profound conclusion: no matter how many lives we lead, no matter which choices prove pivotal to our development, and no matter the sex and gender assigned to us by our culture, we are all much smaller than history. Our task then is to follow Patricia’s example and make the best of what we have, even when the world around us is terrifying, even though sorrow is always hovering in the offing.