The Need
Helen Phillips, 2019
Simon & Schuster
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781982113162
Summary
The Need, which finds a mother of two young children grappling with the dualities of motherhood after confronting a masked intruder in her home, is "like nothing you’ve ever read before… in a good way" (People).
When Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room, she tries to convince herself it’s the sleep deprivation. She’s been hearing things these days. Startling at loud noises. Imagining the worst-case scenario. It’s what mothers do, she knows.
But then the footsteps come again, and she catches a glimpse of movement.
Suddenly Molly finds herself face-to-face with an intruder who knows far too much about her and her family. As she attempts to protect those she loves most, Molly must also acknowledge her own frailty.
Molly slips down an existential rabbit hole where she must confront the dualities of motherhood: the ecstasy and the dread; the languor and the ferocity; the banality and the transcendence as the book hurtles toward a mind-bending conclusion.
In The Need, Helen Phillips has created a subversive, speculative thriller that comes to life through blazing, arresting prose and gorgeous, haunting imagery. The novel is a glorious celebration of the bizarre and beautiful nature of our everyday lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1981
• Wjere—state of Colorado, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., Brooklyn College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Helen Phillips is the author of the novels, Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015) and The Need (2019) . She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. Her collection, And Yet They Were Happy, was also a finalist for the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize, and her work has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Slice, BOMB, Mississippi Review, and PEN America.
Phillips has been an assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Motherhood is a monstrosity in this engrossing novel, which opens with a mother clutching her children, fearful she hears an intruder. She doubts herself—not only about whether she’s imagined the break-in, but about how to exist as a mother. The story is maddening, panicky and full of black humor, much like parenthood itself.
New York Times
Phillips, as careful with language as she is bold with structure, captures many small sharp truths…. Everyday life, here, is both tedious and fascinating, grotesque and lovely, familiar and tremendously strange. Molly—worrying about the person she is becoming… is finally alive to it all, to its terrors but also, on those rare occasions when everyone is happy (or asleep), to its incandescent joys.
New York Times Book Review
Mothers will recognize so much in this fresh novel—but they aren’t the only ones who should read it. Phillips has found a way to make these experiences universal, acknowledging the importance of the other—the creature without whom none of us would exist.
Washington Post
Thrillingly disturbing, frighteningly insightful about motherhood and love, and spilling over with offhand invention, The Need is one of this year’s most necessary novels.
Guardian (UK)
What begins as a hyperventilating domestic noir morphs into elegant speculative fiction, and then into a grand hymn to motherhood.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
A taut thriller...Between chills, readers will notice the pleasures of Phillips’s prose. Her style combines the sensibility of a poet with the forward drive of a thriller.… Phillips’s crystalline style vividly evokes her characters. She draws them so precisely that before we know it, we’re deep inside their lives.… [A] bewitching, fiercely original novel.
Boston Globe
An elegant dread slips through this elusive novel like wisteria on a crumbling wall...Many books claim to be domestic thrillers. The Need is the mother of them all.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
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.
O Magazine
Helen Phillips is best known for her delirious and philosophical short stories, and in her second novel, she combines her impeccable brevity with plot that unfolds like a paper snowflake.
Vanity Fair
This fever dream of a novel starts like a thriller (someone’s in the living room), morphs into speculative sci-fi… and ends up like nothing you’ve ever read before. In a good way.
People
What Helen Phillips builds from the first paragraphs is too clever, and moves too quickly, to be easily ground down in a review.
Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review) An unforgettable tour de force that melds nonstop suspense, intriguing speculation, and perfectly crafted prose.… With its crossover appeal to lovers of thriller, science fiction, and literary fiction, this story showcases an extraordinary writer at her electrifying best.
Publishers Weekly
[G]ripping, shape-shifting … Is this literary work a story of magical realism, a straight-up horror novel…, or a product of Molly's exhausted imagination? Of course, it's all of the above and makes for an unforgettable—and polarizing—reading experience. —Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ
Library Journal
A skillfully crafted, thought provoking domestic thriller.
Booklist
(Starred review) Phillips' fuguelike novel, in which the protagonist's tormentor may be either other or self, is a parable of parenting …. It is also a superbly engaging read—quirky, perceptive, and gently provocative. Molly may be losing her marbles, but we can't help rooting for her to find herself.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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