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Broken Heart
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When Love Was Clean Underwear
In The Life of Reason, George Santayana famously notes that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it–or, as the popular interpretation of this dictum would have it, that we need to learn from our mistakes. The problem that Lucy Pescitelli, the protagonist of Susan Barr-Toman’s debut novel, When Love Was Clean Underwear, faces, however, is that she doesn’t have much of a past to speak of and, as a result, hasn’t made the mistakes that the rest of us made in our teens with respect to dating, friendship, and relating to other people in general. As a result, she spends much of the novel attempting to navigate the choppy waters of adult relationships–something she’s never done, despite the fact that she’s nearing thirty.
The novel begins with Lucy agonizing over her dying mother’s request to be euthanized. That she carries out her mother’s wishes by smothering her with a pillow is entirely fitting, as the mother has been smothering Lucy with her own brand of “love” for over a decade. Indeed, despite her death, the mother’s presence is palpable throughout the novel. She haunts Lucy night and day, causing the protagonist to vacillate between doubting her every instinct and feeling guilty for everything she does.
Compounding the problems that Lucy must overcome is the South Philly neighborhood where she resides. In effect, the South Philadelphia that Barr-Toman has created is the ghost of Lucy’s mother writ large. Its will is unbending, its assumptions uncompromising, its outlook provincial. It is, in short, a closed universe with its own rules and regulations, both spoken and unspoken, that hem Lucy in, almost to the point of claustrophobia. Lucy, to put it bluntly, is in an inescapable (though well-meaning) circle of hell consisting of row homes, nosy neighbors, and not enough parking.