Soon after Magda Eklund turns 65, she and her longtime best friend Sara have a discussion about birthday parties. Magda brings up one of her earlier parties, where Sara was at first “nowhere to be seen,” eventually arriving late. Sara reassures her by saying, “Mags, I will only ever surprise you by showing up, how’s that? For the rest of your life, whenever you least expect it, I’ll be there.”
That prescient pledge turns out to be the premise of Anna Montague’s debut novel, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? By 2011, when Magda turns 70, Sara has died—quite suddenly—and her husband has asked Magda to become caretaker of Sara’s ashes because his girlfriend is moving in. Magda, a psychiatrist, obliges: The ebullient, artsy Sara was the shining light in her life, and after her death Magda has drifted. She spends all of her time helping patients in her Manhattan practice, while steadfastly ignoring her own confounding issues. She continues to write letters to her late friend, noting, for instance, “How perhaps I’ve always been a better custodian of other people’s feelings than my own.” However, when she stumbles upon Sara’s plans for the two of them to celebrate Magda’s 70th birthday with a road trip, Magda decides to forge ahead with the journey.
In lesser hands, this setup—having a deceased major character—might present hurdles, such as the difficulty of revealing layers of the past while advancing the plot, and of making Magda’s interior psychological journey compelling. Rest assured, Montague nimbly tackles each of these challenges and more, including frequent, well-balanced doses of humor and pathos. Magda’s road trip, which includes stops in Virginia, Tennessee, New Orleans, Texas and New Mexico, allows her to meet an intriguing succession of characters, all while learning more about her own psyche and her relationship with Sara. At one point, she wanders into a women’s retreat, where the dubious director’s words prove apt: “The real trips happen here, in our heads. In our hearts.”
How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? is a noteworthy debut about looking back while moving forward. Friendship, love, regret, repression, grief, yearning, aging and new beginnings—Montague explores each of these themes with both creative and contemplative depth.
Read our interview with Anna Montague about How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?
