Introduction

The searing and haunting debut novel from PEN finalist and New York Times bestselling author Andrea J. Buchanan

Spanning five generations of women, Five-PartInvention wrestles with the question—if trauma echoes through generations, can love echo, too? Is the love we transmit enough to undo the trauma of the past that we unwittingly carry with us and often re-enact in the present?

When Lise, a pianist, suffers a nervous breakdown early in her marriage, her husband, in a warped act of protection and jealousy, has her piano taken away. With prose that is precise and emotionally affecting, Buchanan vividly renders how Lise's separation from her one source of expression and fulfilment cascades into her relationship with her daughter, leaving a legacy of trauma that echoes through the generations to come. Characters emerge broken and passionate, jagged, and yet hopeful and emotionally resonant, written in a way that only Buchanan, herself a conservatory-trained pianist, could achieve.

Five-Part Invention is by turns frightening and exquisitely observed, and establishes Buchanan as a literary force.

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Excerpt

This is not a confession.

It is not even an explanation.

I know I was a bad mother to you. That’s why I’m here, in the place for bad mothers whose daughters have forgotten about them. Now, don’t make that face. I know you haven’t forgotten me. But you don’t know what it’s like here, paralyzed by time, when all there is to do is think of all the ways I have failed you, all the stories you don’t know, all the reasons I had, or thought I had. All I have here is time to think, time to replay the events of my life, to undo somehow our estrangement, make things turn out better, change what happened between us. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. This novel is filled with music, from its focus on characters who are musicians to the philosophy of performance and art itself. How does music affect your own life? Were you able to relate to narrators whose lives are shaped so much by their art?

2. Women’s bodily autonomy is very much a theme of this book. We first meet Lise, who is forbidden by her husband Mor to play the piano—in essence to use her own hands. Throughout the book, there is a fairy tale woven in, called “The Girl With the Silver Hands,” about a girl whose missing hands are replaced with silver ones. We witness Lise and her descendants share this story with their daughters, and we see how each generation interprets that fairy tale more deeply. How do you think each character’s understanding of the fairy tale is shaped by the generation they’re born into, and their own understanding of autonomy?

3. Hope, Lise’s great-granddaughter, is the first woman in this lineage who is able to mother the way we all wish to be mothered: unconditionally. She is also the only one who is a single mother from the start, and who is not trying to balance motherhood and marriage. Do you see these two aspects of her character as connected?

4. Zoey, Hope’s daughter, has a love of words and is the most self-reflective character in the novel. But she also wrestles with deep emotions. Trauma, it seems, has touched every woman in this family, even as each generation progresses towards a fuller understanding of themselves, their family heritage, and the world they live in. Is intergenerational trauma a theme you have encountered your own family? Are there decisions that you have made in your own life to consciously shift the dynamic of family history or events you have lived through?

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