When Lila Pereira, executive director of the Washington Globe, dies in 2023 her passing makes front-page news. Pereira’s memorial service was mobbed with thousands of mourners. Ten speakers praised Lila’s decisive, tough-minded leadership and her illustrious career as top dog political reporter. Clara, Lila’s sister recited the Kaddish. Her grief-stricken husband, Joe Maier, her two devoted daughters, Ava and Stella, stood by to honor Lila’s achievements. But when Lila’s youngest daughter, Grace, enters her mother’s memorial service she whispers to her best friend, “Do you think I am on the guest list”?

 

The relationship between Lila and Grace had always been contentious. At age ten, Grace carried a notebook where she wrote her grievances and posed question about Lila’s parenting. Why was her mother always at work? Why did Lila ask her three children to call her by her first name, not Mommy or Mom? Why didn’t Lila attend parent-teacher’s meetings, birthdays or graduations of any of her three daughters? Grace told her friends her mother was dead! Their relationship deteriorated after Grace published a “combustible” novel titled The Last Mother. Designated fiction, the story describes a woman who was committed to a mental hospital and died there. Grace’s fiction far too closely resembled her grandmother, Zelda’s, actual life.

 

Grace grew up hearing the strange story about grandma Zelda, Lila’s mother. In 1960 Aldo, Lila’s father, Grace’s grandfather committed Zelda to a mental hospital where she died in 1968. Aldo was a violent drunk. Lila regularity took the beatings from Aldo for her other two siblings, her sister Clara and brother Polo. Lila became feral in her protection of them. She carried a switchblade on her all the time! Determined to rise above her miserable life Lila’s aspirational mantra “I can do this” took her to Michigan University where she met her future husband Joe Maier. Joe’s family was blotto rich. When Lila first saw Joe’s house she exclaimed, “You live in Tara?” It was not Joe’s wealth, however, that endeared Lila to her future husband but his adoration of her. Joe loved Lila unconditionally…switchblade and all.

 

Lila demanded one condition before she accepted Joe’s marriage proposal. “I know nothing about being a mother --- I can do pregnancy, childbirth–I can’t see myself raising them.” Lila was as good as her word. He career occupied her entire life. Joe remained her ballast and raised the kids. But Grace kept asking questions about Lila’s mother her own grandmother Zelda. What really happened to Zelda? Did she really die in the mental hospital? Or did she run away from a violent marriage and abandon her children? Is Lila taking a page from Zelda’s notebook and choosing career over her children? A letter from “beyond the grave” sends Grace on a journey with the imperative “find Zelda”.

A Kryptonite read!