In 'Take What You Need,' novelist Idra Novey follows a woman returning to her small town to mourn her stepmother — and confront the bigotry she'd fled.
confirmation hearings. It made her novel timely, but what made it stand out was Novey’s sensitivity and nuanced understanding of the stakes. Her follow-up is even better. It’s also timely in its way, a counterweight to certain narratives of Appalachia that strip their characters’ lives of joy and meaning while also bleaching out the stains of racism and class struggle. Its real subject is what it means to love, and what you’re willing to tolerate, even if it means separating yourself from home.
Years later, Leah won’t read fairy tales to her son. “It’s felt like a neat and necessary excision,” she explains, “leaving out Jean and the confusing appetites of those old tales. I’m fumbling enough already, ambling motherless into motherhood.” Jean too once dreamed of escaping home. She longed to go to New York, to live and work among other artists. The daughter of a welder who dismissed her suggestions for his work as too “girly,” she eventually became a sculptor. Obsessed with such figures as, she has kept her Jewishness from most of her neighbors, recognizing that their bigotry could easily turn on her. But rather than seeing the townspeople as threats, she feels pity for them, especially the young men.
Leah doesn’t share in her stepmother’s pity for those who remain in her hometown; she feels only alarm. She berates herself for the way her body stiffens when she sees young men who wear camouflage and stare at her family for too long.
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