Michelle Porter, Metis writer of poetry and prose, follows several women in the same family in her debut novel, A Grandmother Begins A Story. In alternating chapters, the book gives voice to Mame, who is dead and making her way through the spirit world; her daughter Genevieve, who is in her 80s when she checks herself into a rehab center in the hopes of finally kicking her alcoholism; and Genevieve's great-granddaughter Carter, who has just been contacted by her grandmother (Genevieve's daughter Lucie) with a request to help kill her. Through these women's chapters, we learn of further relations like Velma, Genevieve's sister, a fiddler of great skill and passion who died young, and Allie, Lucie's daughter and Carter's mother, who gave Carter up for adoption as a baby.
Carter, for example, the youngest character the novel closely follows, is herself a mother to Tucker, a little boy she's recently sent to live with his dad, Slavko. She keeps planning to go and get him, but then distracts herself with a new lover, a new adventure, or a renewed need to survive. It's not that she doesn't love him or wish to parent him but she's unsure whether she's fit to do so. Having been given away by Allie and then adopted by a violent woman, R, Carter understandably has a difficult time trusting the institution of motherhood. Even so, Carter keeps reaching out for connection to her birth mother's family, almost despite herself.
Matriarchs are essential to the novel, which is structured like a tapestry, its various characters weaving through and around each other's stories.
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