Lihi Lapid’s novel I Wanted to Be Wonderful begins as a seemingly lighthearted take on modern marriage and turns into a surprisingly harrowing indictment of motherhood in a capitalist culture.
Unfolding along two parallel tracks, half of the novel is narrated in the first person by an ambitious photojournalist resembling Lapid herself, and half is told in the style of an ironic fairy tale, starring a “Princess” whose classic storybook vision increasingly chafes against the complex demands of life today. Both women are citizens of the same secular, careerist circles, but each stakes out a different path through the stations of starting and maintaining a family while remaining true to her independent spirit. What both women share in common is the heartbreaking discovery that each of those goals seem hopelessly at odds with the other.
Previous generations of women were saddled with the work of homemaking essentially without question. But Lapid’s characters are navigating a landscape where a standard rulebook no longer applies. The saying goes, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in the baby carriage … but what exactly comes after that, if there are supposedly no limits to one’s horizons?
This novel covers the next possible phase: perilously of attempting to maintain a career and a family. “I wanted to be a great mother,” says the former photojournalist, “a charming, wonderful mother and not just an all right mother. That wasn’t the reason I had conceived a child. That wasn’t why I had left the professional path.” As Lapid demonstrates through her two protagonists, each of whom tries, in her own way, to maintain fulfilling lives while being unreasonably terrific mothers, there is simply no way to do everything right. The kicker, though, is that — despite everything — women are expected to meet these tremendous expectations with gratitude and aplomb. It is no wonder that both the Princess and the photographer unravel as they do.
I Wanted to be Wonderful joins a growing body of literature exploring the messy contours of maternal discontent.The novel’s ending, with its pitiless honesty, may be as revelatory for readers as it is to its characters.
Megan Peck Shub is an Emmy-winning producer at Last Week Tonight, the HBO political satire series. Previously she produced Finding Your Roots on PBS. Her work has been published in New York Magazine, The Missouri Review, Salamander, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other publications.