I TRUST HER COMPLETELY

After decades of solitude, a San Francisco author’s life—and her ambitions—change when she reconnects with a college friend in Henneberg’s novel.

For years, Josiewas convinced that Radhika, an incisive editor whom she met at a college writing seminar, was dead. The announcement, five years after college, that Rad had been diagnosed with breast cancer shocked Josie at first, but in the 12 years that followed, she moved on with her life—completing a graduate degree in fiction, releasing a short story collection to modest praise, and, most recently, attempting to have a baby through artificial insemination. When she comes across an article in The Atlantic that Rad has written—a raw account of her battle with breast cancer during her residency in an abortion clinic, and the subsequent birth of her twins—Josie is hesitant to reach out. But several months later, she runs into her old acquaintance in a grocery store and is swept into her friend’s chaotic life once again. Soon, Josie is at Rad’s house every week to share her writing. Amid the critique sessions, Josie shares her own dream of motherhood, anchored in the sudden, tragic death of her own parents. She grows close to Rad’s idyllic-seeming family and develops a relationship with the young babysitter, who often seems to have a stronger connection with the children than they have with their own mother. But when tragedy strikes, the relationships that Josie has come to hold dear threaten to collapse. Amid the frenzy of Covid-19-era San Francisco, vividly portrayed by Henneberg, Josie must make a series of difficult choices—whether to endure the risks of another pregnancy, to abandon her interminable novel, and to preserve difficult relationships. Over the course of this lucid debut novel, the author offers a nuanced portrayal of the complexities that are inherent to modern womanhood, and she does so by anchoring them to consistently compelling characters. The author’s fast-paced, conversational prose style will draw readers quickly into the lives of the various players, whose imperfections have the effect of making them more sympathetic.

A thoughtful and elegant exploration of 21st-century motherhood.