Review: Night Night Fawn

Night Night Fawn, despite the cutesy title, is anything but. Following Barbara Rosenberg, the book opens with a chapter called “A Woman Marked for Death,” setting the scene of Barb in her old age as a yenta dying of cancer in her rent-stabilized New York City apartment. By all accounts, Barbara is miserable. Not just from the cancer, which she laments, but from a multitude of wrongdoings in her life that have harmed her like countless tiny papercuts. With little external happening to her as she nears death, the reader joins her on a voyage inward, first uncovering the various sources of her lamentations, and then understanding how she has come to be so embittered in her final weeks of life. 

“Every dead man is a felled tree,” Barb reflects at her mother-in-law’s funeral. “But women die ignominiously, like dried raisins stuck to the bottom of a Sun-Maid box.” And this is where she begins, frustrated with the shriveling of her own femininity, the shrinking of her young adulthood aspirations, and the striking mediocrity of her life against what she hoped it would be. Her husband, Stephen, is a bland and tepid character, with little personality compared to Barbara’s boldness. And her daughter, Jordana, is a lesbian, something that incenses Barbara. For readers concerned about issues like homophobia in books they read, I would offer a warning—Barbara by no means supports her daughter, and despite her deep love, continually refers to Jordana with terms that denigrate her and chip away at her dignity. She delivers countless instances of rudeness and unpleasantry to her daughter for not fitting into social norms and not following Barbara’s preconceived path of the heterosexual housewife. And yet throughout it all, Barbara is also aware of her cruelty and the judgment of the reader. “I understand that to people of today I sound like a monster, but this was a motherly concern I had, and between mother and monster no one in the history of philosophy has yet been able to distinguish…” She feels this burden of motherhood, the spectre of being perceived as monstrous, throughout the book. And though this story takes place in the 1990s (or maybe late 80s—there’s little reference to time), Barbara speaks to modern themes that have emerged in research and discourse of over-pressured mothers tasked with creating perfect children, and the high bar that emerges when they inevitably let down or harm their children in the process. 

This is, of course, not to justify the blatant homophobia featured throughout the book. But in understanding Barbara, a yenta who is very much a product of her own traditional era, it is impossible to separate her care for her daughter from her efforts to “remake” Jordana into someone heterosexual. 

“As a woman, there are things you need to do, things to which my daughter was just frolicking through life oblivious. So yes, I was an animal, showing my wayward child where to forage for berries and roots.” The severity of Barbara’s own internalized sexism becomes apparent over the course of the book as she clings with greater ferocity to rigid gender norms. Yet as the reader, you also begin to see cracks in her facade of hatred, moments where it’s apparent that, in wishing for Jordana to change, Barbara wishes something deeper for herself instead. 

The deeply and inevitably reflective nature of this book makes it difficult to read in one sitting. In many ways, Barbara’s disappointment with her own life—with herself, and her marital decisions—came back to hurt Jordana the most, creating a link of intergenerational trauma between the two pernicious gender norms. 

At its heart, this book really focuses on what it means to be a Jewish woman in a Christian or secular male-dominated world. Barbara and Jordana have a little community in New York City. They are expected to conform to non-Jewish beauty standards, with references to rhinoplasty, and still must contend with snide comments from strangers in public about clothing choice or other aesthetics. As a reader, the parallels between the struggles that both women face are indeed overwhelming, and I found myself deeply wishing that Barbara was able to set aside her fixation on her daughter’s sexual orientation to recognise that they indeed have had similar experiences. 

But this book isn’t about perfect closure or happy endings. The book’s forte lies in its matter-of-fact and at times grotesque realness. Cancer is not painted glamorously in this book: Barbara soils herself several times and develops a reliance on opioids. Mother-daughter relationships are explored in all their painful potential. But amidst these heavy topics is a rawness and honesty that is difficult to find in many books, and for that I commend the author.