Elaine

Self (Umbrella) based this fictionalization of his mother’s first marriage on a trove of diaries discovered after her death. The author, a self-described psychogeographer and sometime journalist, reveals Elaine’s most intimate character, insofar as children can know their parents from before their birth. Enhanced by Laurel Lefkow’s low, sardonic narration, Self’s pithy style and broodingly introspective subject hold listeners’ attention with a mix of sympathy and schadenfreude. One of the “New York Jews” that her German American husband’s work colleagues complain are filling up Cornell University’s literature departments, Elaine lives with the continuous background noise of antisemitism, sexism, and racism, all of which she internalized early. Self lets her examine these biases without ridding her of them, exposing her flaws as the plot builds to decisions that compromise her family stability, unhappy though it is. She craves desirability, either sexual (from someone other than her despised husband) or intellectual (imagining herself as an author), but is stymied by the rigid expectations of 1950s Ithaca, NY, and by a lack of the gift of the surprising, thought-provoking language that typifies her son’s work.