On Friday, August 14, author Heather Abel will give a talk at the West Tisbury Library about her new book, The Emilys. The event begins in 3:30 p.m., where Ms. Abel will be in conversation with writer and podcaster Gabriel Roth.
At the heart of her new novel is a 40-something woman named Eve, who’s living in leafy Northampton and caring for her two children, Lev and Sophy. Her husband, whom Eve refers to as Henry James, commutes from distant New York City, where he’s engaged in a music career.
Eve secretly wants to be crowned “queen of mothers,” but not only is motherhood a challenge (her daughter, for instance, is currently refusing to walk on grass), but she feels isolated in Northampton, down the road from Amherst, long associated with the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson.
On one level, it’s a potential setup for a standard work of so-called “women’s fiction” but Ms. Abel has much more in mind. The Emilys is an intensely readable feast, a colorful and wildly ambitious book that manages to be at once a challenging examination of motherhood, a knowing assessment of close friendship and the grandest response readers have seen yet to the COVID-19 pandemic, to say nothing of Lyme disease.
Eve’s life in Northampton is complicated by two intertwined things. First, her childhood friend Demeter suddenly re-appears in town, among other things hoping for a treatment for her daughter Persephone, who’s suffering from a strange malady — light, especially sunlight, makes her sick. And second, people with Persephone’s condition, nicknamed “The Emilys” in a nod to the reclusive Emily Dickinson, seem to be multiplying.
Increasingly the area is filling with people who can’t go out during the day, who can’t even tolerate indoor lighting. As Eve becomes more involved in reconnecting with Demeter, she becomes more involved in the struggle to understand this weird new illness, which is thought by some to be caused by tick-bites, dismissed by others as entirely psychosomatic, and reduced by one clinical psychologist as “post-pandemic syndrome,” something as simple as agoraphobia.
“Do we say our local hero Emily Dickinson was ill from 5G or from a fungus or from fluoride?” the psychologist argues. “No. We say she suffered from agoraphobia.”
Demeter and Eve encounter doctors who belittle and mock their patients, social workers who are wary of possible abuse, and insurance companies that deny any claims connected with the condition. Even Eve’s mother, more caustic than ever and freshly returned to Eve’s life on the occasion of having her cult-classic “Wormfood” novel given a new edition, seems to be on the verge of becoming an Emily.
Naturally, Eve’s thoughts turn to understanding this post-pandemic syndrome, joining an odd coven of people likewise dedicated to finding a cure. At one point she runs across a century-old reference to something called “Sun Madness,” in which a long-dead author presciently wrote, “Fear is bilious…. In fearful times, Sun Madness flourished. Under halcyon skies, it left.”
There’s a rumored plant-based fix, but has the plant gone extinct?
Henry James seems blithe about the whole thing (kids and dogs pick up ticks, he says complacently). And the nostalgia-magic summoned in Eve’s mind by the return of Demeter is now a tangled, complicated thing. Suddenly Eve’s past, present, and future are upended.
“I want more life,” she thinks at one point. “I want adventure.”
But as always in fiction, such desires have a heavy cost. Eve herself knows this.
“For children to set off on an adventure, the mother must die – drown or be killed by Voldemort or expire from cancer,” she admits. “Only then can a story begin.”
The story here is overflowing with eloquence and color, almost top-heavy with invention and abundance (in a specific nod to Tolstoy, there’s even a chapter told from a tick’s perspective). Secondary characters are fleshed out in generous detail, even while one central character, Demeter, remains tantalizingly elusive. And suffusing every beautifully-written page is the shadow of our own bilious, fearful times.
This article appears in August 14, 2026.