Up Front

By The Editors

This week, Jennifer Gilmore reviews “The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving,” a novel by Jonathan Evison, in which a former stay-at-home dad who lost his children in a grisly accident becomes a caregiver for hire. “Caretaking is often stereotyped as women’s work,” Gilmore wrote in an e-mail, but in Evison’s book, “caring deeply, dealing with grief, transcends gender.”

Gilmore has recently finished her third novel, “The Mothers,” which follows a couple as they navigate the labyrinthine process of adopting a child. She was motivated in part by her observations of how motherhood is discussed in our culture. “So many of the arguments we’re having now — can women have it all, for instance — were hot debates when I was young and my mother worked full time,” Gilmore told us. “It’s incredible, and a little dull, that we are still at the same place. For the protagonist in my book, who longs for a child but does not yet have one, the war between the stay-at-home moms versus the moms with (the best) nannies is only an abstract idea. Having it all for her means something entirely different, as it does for many women, even those with children.”

But “The Mothers” was also animated by a more personal experience. “My husband and I have been involved in a long, drawn-out domestic adoption process that has led us to many places but has so far not given us a child. I don’t usually write books that appear to track so closely with my life, but there was so much about the process of open adoption that I was attracted to as a novelist. It’s fascinating and maddening. Also, I felt that if I wrote about it, I could take a fraught undertaking and make it interesting to myself. I decided to go with interesting instead of just emotionally devastating.”