“Somebody up there has got it in for me,” Meryl Streep’s character grumbles in the film “Mamma Mia.” “I bet it’s my mother.” That sentiment could have been uttered by any of the mothers or daughters in Sarai Johnson’s stirring debut novel, which follows a family of Black women through four generations as they struggle to transcend their violent pasts.
“Grown Women” joins a lineage of epic family dramas that erupt with long-hidden secrets, devastating losses and ghosts. But Johnson’s interests extend beyond family antagonisms. “Grown Women” contemplates what happens when a child can’t depend on “the most basic, essential love the world had to offer,” and how Black women overcome the combined hurdles of generational trauma and a culture that limits nearly every facet of their lives.
The story begins in 1974 Nashville with Charlotte, who recently left Atlanta to escape her mother’s abuse. She gives birth to a baby she has so little interest in delivering that she hasn’t bothered to come up with a name and won’t comfort the girl when she cries. Born into a world of Mercedes-Benzes and Gucci suitcases, and a family who expected her, a talented pianist, to attend Spelman College, Charlotte ends up as a single mother answering phones at a real estate agency.
Four years later, Charlotte’s daughter, Corinna, sweetly colors at the kitchen table while her mother daydreams about filicide. Charlotte decides she needs a husband to relieve the burde.