How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?

DEBUT In this tender but assured debut novel, Magda Eklund reckons with the loss of her beloved best friend, Sara. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Sara had been the one who was wide open to the world’s possibilities. Magda, a psychoanalyst, was much more cautious, never dipping her toes into love and relationships. Her life is composed of routines: seeing the same clients weekly, making a routine phone call to her sister (when she can’t avoid it), and working in the same medical practice, with the same doctors, for decades. Sara was the one who brought spontaneity to her life, and now she’s gone. Yet, here Magda is, at the age of 70, feeling the need to complete the road trip Sara had planned for them both. Taking along Sara’s ashes for the ride, Magda unspools the threads of her life with Sara and her own family, making space for her own long-buried sexual identity.