when we were in middle school, my father had taken me and Leora to New York to see Les Misérables. In the car afterward, he had complained about the sentimentalization of motherhood—how motherhood, “mother love,” was supposed to automatically make a character saintly, but in fact Fantine in Les Misérables was a prostitute and had dubious morality, and wasn’t like Jean Valjean, who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed his family.
