To any passerby she would have looked like any mother out for a walk with her kids.
The sun warned of the summer to come. She had forgotten her sunglasses. But her eyes were tougher now.
Every so often her hands searched for their wrists, their pulses at first evading her fingertips, then found.
There was a moment when a fire truck came down the frontage road, heading straight toward them, wailing and flashing, before turning left.
But the children were not alarmed, for they were with her, safe, and she bore them onward.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It brings me joy to acknowledge:
Sarah E. Allen, for her awe-inspiring expertise in paleobotany. Vanessa Monson, for sharing her knowledge of archaeology. Lisa Schwebel, for consultation about Biblical matters. Nora Lisman Zimbler, for our conversations about psychology and loss.
My agent, Faye Bender, whose steady heart and hand have guided me for so many years now. Jenny Meyer and Jason Richman, for supporting this book.
My editor, Marysue Rucci, whose exceptional passion and brilliance have enabled this book to become more fully itself. Zachary Knoll, for his acumen and attention to detail. Jonathan Karp, for his powerful advocacy. The rest of the Simon & Schuster team, especially Elizabeth Breeden, Toi Crockett, Erica Ferguson, Alison Forner, Christine Foye, Cary Goldstein, Kayley Hoffman, Amanda Lang, David Litman, Heidi Meier, Tracy Nelson, Lewelin Polanco, Carolyn Reidy, Richard Rhorer, Wendy Sheanin, and Gary Urda. My editor Poppy Hampson at Chatto & Windus, for her keen and caring eye.
All of those many friends who have provided insight along the way, literary and otherwise, with special thanks to my generous early readers: Sarah Baron, Amelia Kahaney, Elizabeth Logan Harris, and Maisie Tivnan. And to Laura Perciasepe for the sound advice.
My colleagues and teachers, current and former, in the Brooklyn College Department of English, with special thanks to Joshua Henkin, Jenny Offill, Ellen Tremper, and Mac Wellman.
My students, who have graced my classrooms and my life with their curiosity and energy.
The CUNY Office of Research for the CUNY Book Completion Award.
David Barry, for the photographs.
The editors of my previous books: Sarah Bowlin, Lisa Graziano, and Krista Marino.
My wonderful family, with special thanks to my mother-in-law, Gail Thompson, for plot advice and for excelling at grandparent duty, along with my father-in-law, Doug Thompson. My grandparents, Paul Phillips, Sr., and Mary Jane Zimmermann. My brother, Mark Phillips, for talking science-fiction portals with me. My sister Alice Light, always my earliest reader. My father, Paul Phillips, Jr., for his lifelong encouragement.
My husband, Adam Douglas Thompson, my collaborator in all things great and small.
My beloved daughter and my beloved son.
My mother, Susan Zimmermann, and my sister Katherine Rose Phillips, to whom this book is dedicated.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HELEN PHILLIPS is the author of five books, including the collection Some Possible Solutions, which received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable collection by The Story Prize. Helen has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Calvino Prize in fabulist fiction. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children. Visit HelenCPhillips.com.
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Also by
HELEN PHILLIPS
Some Possible Solutions
The Beautiful Bureaucrat
Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green
And Yet They Were Happy
PRAISE
“A profound meditation on the nature of reality… An extraordinary and dazzlingly original work from one of our most gifted and interesting writers.”
“Phillips is, as always, doing something at once wildly her own and utterly primal. Maybe it doesn't surprise me that the strangest book I've read about motherhood is also the best, but it does thrill me.”
“Spellbinding… both unsettling and irresistible. Phillips manifests the surreal, terrifying, and visceral experience of motherhood.”
“Helen Phillips has created an existential page-turner that captures, with perfect sharpness, the fierce delirium of motherhood, the longing to understand the workings of our universe, and the wondrous and terrifying mystery that is time. The Need is a brain-bending heartbreaker of a novel, and definitive proof that Helen Phillips is one of the most spellbindingly original writers working today.”
“Hypnotically eerie… Phillips structures her astonishing fifth book in edge-of-your-seat mini-chapters that infuse domesticity with a horror-movie level of foreboding, reminding us that the maternal instinct is indeed a primal one.”
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