Omega Farm

Starred review from July 31, 2023
Novelist McPhee (An Elegant Woman) delivers a piercing account of her unexpected return to her childhood home during the Covid-19 pandemic. When McPhee was five, she and her three sisters followed their mother, photographer Pryde Brown, from Princeton, N.J., to the eponymous estate in rural New Jersey after Pryde divorced her husband, writer John McPhee, and moved in with still-married therapist Dan Sullivan. When she was 11, McPhee awoke one night to find Sullivan sexually abusing her. She remained haunted by memories of the assault into adulthood—“he pleasure and the shame and the guilt, the desire to protect, the fear, wanting to be good”—which complicated her decision to move back to the farm in 2020 so she could care for her mother, who had been diagnosed with dementia. McPhee parallels the extensive physical repairs she made to the farm with her efforts to repair herself by confronting the ways her mother helped enable Sullivan’s abuse. She balances these tough truths with tenderness, as when she credits Pryde for believing in her dreams of becoming a writer despite her academic struggles (“She saw deep into the future—where the dreams of the present could become manifest if believed”). The result is a courageous self-examination made of equal parts candor and compassion. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.