Published in 2023
368 pages
Julia Franks is the author of The Say So and Over the Plain Houses, an NPR Best Book of 2016 that also won five prestigious literary prizes (the Townsend Prize for Georgia fiction, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Award, the SIBA Southern Book Prize, Georgia Author of the Year, and the IPPY Gold Medal). She’s also published stories and essays in The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, and other places. She lives in Atlanta.
What is this book about?
From the award-winning author of Over the Plain Houses, comes a major novel about two young women contending with unplanned pregnancies in different eras.
Edie Carrigan didn’t plan to “get herself” pregnant, much less end up in a Home for Unwed Mothers. In 1950s North Carolina, illegitimate pregnancy is kept secret, wayward women require psychiatric cures, and adoption is always the best solution. Not even Edie’s closest friend, Luce Waddell, understands what Edie truly wants: to keep and raise the baby.
Twenty-five years later, Luce is a successful lawyer, and her daughter Meera now faces the same decision Edie once did. Like Luce, Meera is fiercely independent and plans to handle her unexpected pregnancy herself. Digging into her mother’s past, Meera finds troubling evidence of Edie, and also of her own mother’s secrets. As the three women’s lives intertwine and collide, the story circles age-old questions about female awakening, reproductive choice, motherhood, adoption, sex, and missed connections.
For fans of Brit Bennett’s The Mothers and Jennifer Weiner’s Mrs. Everything, The Say So is a timely novel that asks: how do we contend with the rippling effects of the choices we’ve made? With precision and tenderness, Franks has crafted a sweeping epic about the coming of age of the women’s movement that reverberates through the present day.
