Katie Gavin’s single “Aftertaste” on her solo album, What a Relief, offers lyrics to the remembrance of someone on your lips. Those lyrics echo the scene in Frances Ha where Sophie and Frances look at each other across the room and Frances says, “It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them and they know it … but because … that is your person in this life.”
Emma Cleary’s Afterbirth differs from these pop culture predecessors’ “coming of age,” instead offering a whirlwind of emotional placenta at the reunion of sisters Izzy and Brooke. After long-term girlfriend Cecilia breaks up with Brooke, she moves back from her teaching program in Japan, with her parents, navigating the twenties malaise oft spoken of in The New Me by Halle Butler. However, filled with filial piety for her half-sister (never referred to as such) Izzy, Brooke flies to Canada to see her through a hysterectomy to remove a uterine mass mimicking the appearance of pregnancy leaving Izzy buried with pain.
Nestled in the same bed as full-grown adults and ten years apart, the sisters find a palpable distance has grown between them in the one-bedroom apartment. Izzy won’t tell Brook why she had baby clothes buried in the drawers, nor will she speak of her dalliances with Sasha, a silent figure in the apartment. Brooke’s first-person narration ebbs in and out of present scenes thinking back on her relationship with Cecilia, her feminine presentation, the day she packed her suitcase and said goodbye, the day a man on the train harassed her and Brooke picked up her spilled tote bag instead of saying something—that, she thinks, was the demise of her relationship.
Although Cecilia does not appear in the present action, the most poignant character in the novel is the building tenant Medusa, in whom we see the uncanny materialized. Between the sisters, Medusa, real name unknown, lurks in the hallways curmudgeonly complaining. Her hair and coat are wild. She wails when there’s a power outage seemingly heard by no one but Brooke. And maybe, just maybe, there’s some correlation between the disappearance of things around the apartments in the building: tea towels, a crystal, and even a dog.
Medusa’s lore reminds us of Baba Yaga and her house on chicken legs. You only find Medusa if she wants to be found. The novel’s central conflict entwines a few female dynamics. The archetypes of the female experience, overly simplified, but used like a crutch—maiden, mother, crone—characterize the tension between Izzy, Brooke, and Medusa.
After reminiscing on watching horror movies with Cecilia—her analysis and the characters that pop out of the screens—Brooke is primed to notice the uncanny around her. Beyond object appearances, Medusa appears in apparitions, in the mirror while Brooke takes a new man to the bathroom, in the kitchen gnawing on a chicken leg, and not in the belief of her sister Izzy.
These supernatural encounters culminate in a body horror of Brooke achieving what Izzy most desires, a child. Inverse from Izzy’s surgery, Brooke’s burgeoning bump causes her physical pain, but also an emotional conflict of belief between the two sisters—with Brooke no longer able to walk the halls and see Medusa, the boy-who-cried-wolf drama ensues onto the normalcy of Brooke’s pregnancy. What escalates gestationally faster than 9 months, sending Izzy into a spiral, begs the question: who is Brooke carrying?
From the publishers of Zefyr Lisowski’s Uncanny Valley Girls, a memoir with allusions of horror movies and entwined relationships to the body and the self, Afterbirth offers an uncanny retelling not of a fairy tale but of horror. It’s a story about what is most feared in aging and motherhood, tinged with a little bit of world bending, wall bending in the form of Medusa.
Finding the center of the novel requires a Lewis Carrol–like descent down the rabbit hole, with Brooke and bones and all.
FICTION
Afterbirth
By Emma Cleary
Harper
Published March 24, 2026
