Masad’s novel oscillates back and forth between Maggie’s and Iris’s perspectives, jumping through five decades of Iris’s life and the 10 or so days in Maggie’s after Iris’s death. Iris dies from a car accident leaving behind her husband, son, and daughter – Maggie who is the main character. maggie was an excellent main character, i sympathized with her greatly and she was very relatable and human, i truly felt all of her feelings and her confusion and pain and grief with her mother and everything else in her life.

This remarkable portrait of a daughter’s opaque relationship with her mother reflects the strangeness and beauty of coming to see one’s parent fully as a human being. Narrated by Maggie in the present and Iris at various junctures in her past, it’s a fascinating commentary on how the people we love often hide their true selves from us, and how that affects our interactions with them.Her essays, reviews, and other writings have been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, and Elle among others. all of the lovers were equally interesting to read about, and they provided an additional sense of suspense and another layer to uncover. Emotionally powerful and thought-provoking, Ilana Masad's debut novel, All My Mother's Lovers, is a look at family dynamics, secrets, motherhood, sexuality, marriage, and grief.

i found it a bit slow in the beginning, but near the end i was definitely more compelled and i found myself immersed in the story. That said, after she finds the letters, Maggie realizes perhaps she knew far less about her parents’ relationship than she thought. This book was most interesting in the places where Masad sought to untangle the complexities of identity/attraction/how people bring themselves to their relationships, which I think, in theory, should’ve been present throughout, but instead shone through primarily in Iris’s and Peter’s narratives.Maggie and her mother, Iris, weren't close, especially since Maggie came out, but she never thought they would run out of time to figure each other out. As Maggie sets