Fic­tion

I Want­ed to Be Won­der­ful: A Braid­ed Novel

  • Review
By – October 21, 2025

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.

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