Sleep

Every parent exists within two families simultaneously - the one she was born into, and the one she has made.

Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family's lush backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools, Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful prudence. Her mother can be as brittle as she can be loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one fateful summer, everything changes. A line is crossed and in the wake of that betrayal the simple pleasures of girlhood slip away.

Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents' bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She's newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush from all those summers ago, punched out of time. She must now reckon with the echoes between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child truly safe, and just how much of our lives are ours alone.

Beautifully written, unflinchingly human, and life-affirming, Sleep is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the burden of love and what lies on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility.

About the Author

Honor Jones is a senior editor at The Atlantic and formerly worked as a senior staff editor at The New York Times' Opinion desk; her writing has appeared in The Atlantic and The New York Times.