The Tree Doctor: A Novel

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Was that really the point of fiction now, that one read in order to see oneself in the world of the protagonist? Then again, she’d usually experienced the characters in the classics—most of whom were white—as living lives different from her own. Maybe that was not normal. She did not read and imagine that anything that happened to someone in a book might happen to her. It had not occurred to her that she had the right to ask for such a thing.

Sometimes it was better not to finish a story.

Sex was not a thing you did or did not do; it was not something you could read about in a book and then perfect. It was a current you rode.

She thought about how it was common for many of the people in her circle to refer to family and to having children as a form of narcissism. It seemed like bad manners to point out to these people, who were otherwise scientific in their thinking, that it was difficult to know what a child was for unless one had a child. She did not think she had had children out of a desire to replicate herself; her daughters were so different from her.