The Long Answer

A profound and provocative debut novel exploring the intimate secrets that women share. How do women directly impact one another with the personal secrets they share? The Long Answer, Anna Hogeland's profound and provocative first novel, offers a direct portal to the intimate centers of relationships between women. Anna, a young woman pregnant with her first child, finds that she is a magnet for the private, tender stories of other women around her-strangers and family alike. In some cases, these stories take the place of more difficult conversations. When Anna's sister, Margot, calls to say she's lost a pregnancy no one knew she was carrying, Margot winds up telling a riveting story about a friend and what she has been going through. And when Anna's own pursuit of motherhood upends her life, the stories become a guiding light to help her tell her own. "I needed stories like this now. I needed them like I needed water and salt, to tell me what was possible in the course of a life after the life you'd planned dies inside you." Incisively written and deeply empathetic, The Long Answer lays open emotional dynamics around female friendship, sisterhood, loss, and love, fueled by women's shared experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility. The intimate, unbearably private nature of the stories, and the unsettling feeling that they would be shared only just this once and never again, is belied by the warmth of the narrator's voice and reserved, translucent prose.