The Stepdaughter

A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation. 

J is a lonely woman without even the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, but he’s left J not only with their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but with the sulky cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage. The presence of a pert au pair, Monique, serves only to make J feel more isolated and self-conscious. What she’d like is someone to blame. 

Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who “invites a kind of cruelty.” This is an invitation J fully intends to take up—and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood’s first novel stands as proof positive of her eternal mastery—and mockery—of the darkest depths of human feeling.

“Contained and ferocious, at once disarmingly and ambiguously candid about blistering feelings which are made to seem commonplace and all the more frightening for that.” 

—Jane Miller, Times Literary Supplement

“The Stepdaughter is the perfect book for people who find Joan Didion too even-keeled, Renata Adler too fair-minded . . . In its own way, it’s a perfect novel . . . Blackwood’s best book . . . It deserves to be a cheeky summer hit.”

—Gideon Leek, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Blackwood is ‘an expert analyst of female fury,’ an outlook which is tempered by her deliciously dark sense of humour. She utilises black comedy as a means to engage with stories of the shocking difficulties faced by women and girls . . . Despite being a ‘savagely original’ voice and an irrepressible talent, Caroline Blackwood remains inexcusably neglected . . . Caroline Blackwood deserves to stand as a northern fiction author on par with her southern contemporary Edna O’Brien.”

—Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado, Irish Times

“Caroline Blackwood sits firmly alongside the greats like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith. Her writing is smart, economical and as dark as night. She takes you deep into the foulest reaches of the human condition and leaves you breathless.” 

—Araminta Hall, author of Imperfect Women

“Caroline the pessimist made the world a happier place to be in because she could make mocking music of its terrors.”

—Jonathan Raban

“Blackwood’s people expect little from the world and are granted as much. Spiritual anemia is a hallmark of contemporary novels, but these mostly lack Blackwood’s élan, her breathless glee at human absurdities. Despite the bleakness of her vision, I find a kind of mangled hope in her obdurate, quixotic characters, in their commitment to the peculiar arrangements that allow them to live with the madness around them, in the baleful laughter behind it all. Life is tricky, trying, often unbearable. Also very funny.”

—Janique Vigier, Bookforum

“One of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived . . .  Her books are concise, mordant essays on evil . . . Blackwood’s magnificent works are like pure odes to odium, her prose cuttingly matter-of-fact . . . Blackwood’s works delve deeply into complicated, ugly relationships between women, something that is especially fascinating when the author herself was defined throughout her lifetime by her marriages to high-profile men.”

—Virginia Feito, CrimeReads

“Blackwood’s macabre humor teases out the farcical aspects of human behavior at its most awkward and unmanageable, addressing outrageous situations with glacial detachment and overtones of Gothic dread. ‘The worst that could happen,’ in Blackwood’s fiction, is what is always happening, and from a certain perspective, always, horribly, hilarious.”

—Gary Indiana

A “savage, controlled first novel . . . conveying her sense of entrapment by her brood of children.”

—Brenda Maddox, Washington Post

“Witty, observant, clever, an unusual entertainment—and something more besides.”

—Robert Nye, The Guardian

“A relentless, concise and (actually) funny book, one that you might put next to Edna O’Brien.” 

—Lorna Sage, The Observer

Caroline Blackwood (1931–1996) was born into an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family and was famous for years largely on account of her flamboyantly bohemian existence, not to mention her tumultuous marriages to the painter Lucian Freud, the pianist and composer Israel Citkowitz, and the poet Robert Lowell. Taking up writing later in life, she soon demonstrated that hers was a mind as brilliant and ruthless as any of the men for whom she’d served as “muse,” producing reportage, fiction, biography, and even a cookbook.

Heidi Julavits is the author of four novels and two books of nonfiction, The Folded Clock and Directions to Myself. With Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, she edited Women in Clothes. She is a founding editor of The Believer magazine and a professor at Columbia University.

The Stepdaughter • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341128

Aug 6, 2024 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 31

5" x 8.5" • 112 pages • $18.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341135