Omega Farm

April 1, 2023

In March 2020, as her mother started sliding into dementia, novelist McPhee (Gorgeous Lies, a National Book Award finalist) returned to her childhood home in New Jersey with her husband and nearly grown children. At Omega Farm, she discovered a property in disrepair, with a broken septic tank and dying ash trees, and took up the multiple tasks of caregiving, fixing the damage, and recalling a complicated childhood there with her four sisters, five stepsiblings, and her mother and stepfather. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 31, 2023
Novelist McPhee (An Elegant Woman) delivers a piercing account of her unexpected return to her childhood home during the Covid-19 pandemic. When McPhee was five, she and her three sisters followed their mother, photographer Pryde Brown, from Princeton, N.J., to the eponymous estate in rural New Jersey after Pryde divorced her husband, writer John McPhee, and moved in with still-married therapist Dan Sullivan. When she was 11, McPhee awoke one night to find Sullivan sexually abusing her. She remained haunted by memories of the assault into adulthood—“he pleasure and the shame and the guilt, the desire to protect, the fear, wanting to be good”—which complicated her decision to move back to the farm in 2020 so she could care for her mother, who had been diagnosed with dementia. McPhee parallels the extensive physical repairs she made to the farm with her efforts to repair herself by confronting the ways her mother helped enable Sullivan’s abuse. She balances these tough truths with tenderness, as when she credits Pryde for believing in her dreams of becoming a writer despite her academic struggles (“She saw deep into the future—where the dreams of the present could become manifest if believed”). The result is a courageous self-examination made of equal parts candor and compassion. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.

August 1, 2023
With a keen eye and mixed emotions, McPhee (An Elegant Woman, 2020) looks back on the pandemic year she and family members spent with her mother in the deteriorating house where McPhee was raised in the woods of New Jersey, a place that "had a strange, brittle weirdness about it." McPhee grew up with nine siblings and stepsiblings, along with a revolving cast of hippie guests who stayed for months or years, under the unsteady supervision of her photographer mother and troubled stepfather. By 2020, her mother, beset with dementia, was living in the house with a caregiver. When McPhee arrived, the house had many problems, including a septic system pouring out raw sewage, dead ash trees, and an out-of-control bamboo grove. With little knowledge and even less money, McPhee set out to repair the house and come to terms with her complicated childhood. She spares neither herself nor family members from criticism in this prickly, wide-ranging account of the many ways in which the past seeps into and poisons the present.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 1, 2023
A writer returns to the storied rural home where she was raised. In her first memoir, McPhee, a novelist and fiction instructor, recounts her move, along with her husband and two teenage children, from New York City to the New Jersey farm where she had lived with her mother, stepfather, four sisters, and five stepsiblings. In March 2020, she felt the need "to shelter-in-place with my ailing mother," who had "vanished into dementia." The property, on 45 acres near the border with Pennsylvania, was in a state of disrepair. As McPhee began a series of increasingly involved home improvement projects--e.g., the eradication of stink bugs, the correction of some creative plumbing work--she confronted, piece by piece, a childhood that was unconventional and chaotic amid a family that prized adventure above all else, sometimes at the expense of its youngest members. Her mother, who was "raised to be beautiful--not smart," encouraged her "four McPhee daughters" to love their stepfather, a charismatic dreamer and unlicensed Gestalt therapist who often met his clients naked in the indoor pool at the farm. An attempt to remove invasive bamboo on the property revealed the need for an expensive new septic system, and McPhee began to consider felling the ash trees in the property's 35-acre forest to recoup the loss. This led her to the much larger project of managing the forest, a massive undertaking that involved replanting the understory and engaging a management hunter to cull sapling-eating deer. McPhee is a captivating writer, gracefully weaving together the disparate strands of familial reckoning, the eerie pandemic years, and her evolving understanding of forest ecology. One of the book's many strengths is the author's ability to see herself clearly: The passages in which she narrates her own bad behavior are fascinating, which is rare in the memoir genre. A potent exploration of the complicated project of revisiting a childhood and maintaining a family legacy.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.