Reading Waldman's Novels Without Pretending They're Solutions
The Beizart family moves from San Francisco to Angel Island in Ayelet Waldman's second novel, which is less a romantic comedy and more a document of people trying not to destroy each other while carrying serious psychiatric diagnoses. I picked it up on a recommendation from a colleague who thought I'd appreciate the accuracy of the schizophrenia portrayal. I finished it in two days. That's not because it's light reading. It's because the momentum is relentless in a way that doesn't announce itself until you're already six chapters deep. The title refers to the mother's professional field—she's a psychiatrist who studies romantic love and the impulses that drive people toward each other and away from each other. The four adult daughters each embody a different relationship to that study, and Waldman structures the novel so you see how a parent's illness reverberates through everyone else's nervous system. The mother has schizophrenia. The father is a screenwriter trying to be present. Each daughter handles her own mental health crisis differently: addiction, eating disorders, avoidance, obsession with control. The book is most honest when it shows that none of these strategies actually work. That's the point, not a complaint. If you're looking for a quick plot summary, here's the functional one: the family inherits a house on Angel Island, decisions about the mother's care become the central conflict, old relationships resurface, and the daughter who runs a restaurant discovers that competence in one area of life doesn't translate to competence in another. The narrative jumps between perspectives and timelines, which some readers find disorienting. I found it realistic. People with complex family histories don't remember their own stories in chronological order.
I want to flag one thing that most reviews gloss over. Waldman herself has bipolar disorder, and that experience shows in the of how she writes mania and depression. It's not romanticized. There's a scene in the middle of the book where a character experiences a depressive episode and the prose literally slows down—longer sentences, less action, more internal static. That's a deliberate craft choice, not filler. Another detail people miss: the island setting isn't symbolic window dressing. It functions as a pressure cooker. The family can't leave each other easily. Ferries run on schedules. Power gets cut. These logistical constraints create the friction that makes the emotional conflicts inevitable. A lot of writers use isolation as setting. Waldman uses it as mechanism. The weaknesses are real and worth stating plainly. Some of the secondary characters—particularly the romantic partners who orbit the sisters—feel underdeveloped. They exist to create conflict or provide emotional support, not as fully realized people. The resolution at the end is more hopeful than the book earns. You can see the shape of the happy ending approaching from about two hundred pages out, and Waldman knows it. She writes toward it anyway, which I suppose is the honest thing to do. Life doesn't resolve cleanly either. A counter-intuitive point that might save you time: don't read this book expecting a psychiatric case study. It's a novel, not a textbook. The accuracy of the illness portrayals is grounded in research and personal experience, but the plot serves character development, not clinical education. If you want accurate depictions of schizophrenia, there are better resources. This book is about what happens when a family decides to stay together anyway. The clinical details are the background. The foreground is love as a discipline, not a feeling.
One specific edge case I encountered while reading: people with personal experience of severe mental illness sometimes find the book triggering rather than validating. I heard this from a reader who told me the eating disorder scenes felt exploitative, not empathetic. That's a fair critique. Waldman writes from the outside in when it comes to some of these experiences, even though she knows them intimately from another angle. The same sensitivity applies in reverse—readers looking for pure representation may feel disappointed. It's a work of fiction, not testimony. Holding both truths at once is the only honest approach. To get the most out of this book, read it straight through without pausing to analyze each chapter's meaning. The structure does its work cumulatively. You'll understand the connections better after you finish than you will mid-read. If you finish it and feel unsettled, that's probably working as intended. The book is available through standard retailers, libraries, and audiobook platforms. The audiobook narration is competent if unremarkable. It doesn't enhance the reading experience significantly, but it's a viable option if you prefer listening. No special edition or annotated version exists that adds meaningful content. The first printing is sufficient.
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