Amazing Grace Adams

Published in 2023, Amazing Grace Adams aligns with mass market publishing trends in “women’s fiction.” This is a loosely defined genre, often encompassing any work that focuses on a female protagonist’s emotional life; indeed, the term has attracted criticism for effectively cordoning off women’s experiences from “serious” literature, as no parallel term exists for works centering on male protagonists engaging in conventionally masculine activities. While much women’s fiction (e.g., romance) has conventionally focused on younger women, in the years prior to the publication of Fran Littlewood’s novel, a string of narratives featuring perimenopausal protagonists emerged on bookstore shelves. In Clare Clark’s review of Littlewood’s novel for The Guardian, she remarks that in 2022, HarperCollins “was ‘actively looking’ for stories that reflected women’s experiences and portrayed ‘menopausal women as smart, funny, powerful characters’” (Clark, Clare. “Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood Review – Hell Hath No Fury.” The Guardian, 25 Jan. 2023). Littlewood’s novel seeks to satisfy this call for feisty, empowered middle-aged women and to destigmatize the physical and emotional experiences of women like Grace. Much like Grace, Littlewood is the middle-aged mother of daughters. She has translated her experiences to the page to grant intellectual and academic mothers like herself and Grace space in the literary world.

However, Grace is not quite the liberated, free-spirited, and self-possessed, middle-aged mother Clark’s description might suggest. Rather, Grace is moody and restless. She is short-tempered and often bewildered and evasive. In her interviews about the novel, Littlewood argues that through Grace she is illustrating what many middle-aged women are actually like. Grace is empowered, but she is also angry. Grace is determined, but she is also unkind. Grace is loving, but she is also distant. In presenting the messy parts of Grace alongside the tender, intimate, and vulnerable parts of her, Littlewood attempts to redefine the contemporary culture’s misconceptions about women, mothers, and aging.

Although the main narrative of Amazing Grace Adams takes place over the course of a single day, Littlewood complicates the plot, stakes, and character arcs by employing a nonlinear structure. These formal and structural subversions are trends in contemporary literary fiction, and Littlewood uses them to mirror and dramatize her protagonist’s emotional experiences. The atypical narrative structure also mirrors high-action television and film, relying upon plot twists and flashbacks to maintain audience engagement. As Littlewood notes in her acknowledgments, the novel’s opening scene intentionally mimics the 1993 Michael Douglas film Falling Down. In Amazing Grace Adams, however, it is a female lead who abandons her vehicle and ventures into the city without a concrete plan, a thorough understanding of herself, or a clear sense of right and wrong.

Amazing Grace Adams’s immediate literary precursors include Elizabeth Strout’s novels Oh William! and Lucy By the Sea, Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, Lisa Taddeo’s Animal, and Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry. As in Amazing Grace Adams, the heroes of these novels wrestle with questions of motherhood and identity, aging and obsolescence, and trauma and the past. In and through her protagonist, Littlewood seeks to stand apart from her contemporaries by embracing humor, extremism, and hyperbole. Grace’s outsized behaviors often tend toward the absurd; in this, the novel suggests, they mirror the dichotomies of life and of motherhood. In Amazing Grace Adams, the ridiculous is entangled with the sorrowful and the traumatic is tempered by the hilarious. Such notions inform Littlewood’s representations of growing older, parenting teenagers, and navigating intimate relationships.