uh oh…. grimdark!

Oh absolutely!!! Easy call. (Not putting you down, anon, by calling your call easy, just agreeing with you.) Lark's situation is a liiiiiittle more complicated than that – my joking little depiction of her deal communicated her inner monologue more than her external actions. In truth she is sort of in a perpetual conflict between the drive to constantly self-define as a good mother* and good wife and the distant pressing knowledge that this is not perfectly true. Soooooo a lot of ways she self defines is by trying to outwardly projecting that perfect ultimate mother image all while not fully believing in it or liking it, so the cracks begin to show, and the older her child gets the more they start wishing she would just admit that she is bisexual and mired in perpetual grief and a little polyamorous** rather than continuing to put up the façade.

so in short i agree with you anon. i'm just mesmerized by the beauty of the world and perpetually invested in #thinking about #lark. The process of ideating ways in which lark could be a bad friend/bad partner/bad mother all while being in many ways a person who is obsessed with her own impact on the world and with her own drive to not hurt other people has been a really productive part of character building for me! Because, once more: once upon a time, in a much earlier version of this novel, she was dull as rocks.

*in many ways in opposition to mina, the ultimate bad mother of her peer group