“Love Forms” by Claire Adam (New York: Hogarth, 2025)
“Love Forms” is a touching novel about the traumas of youth and the traces they leave. Dawn, an adolescent, gets pregnant and gives up her child for adoption. Later in life she realizes that this event leads her to “lose her way.” Through displacements, marriage, more children, and attempts at a career, she finds some fulfillment and much frustration. Her story leads to a determined search, and also some unexpected discoveries, about that child she had lost so many years ago.
Highlighting today’s high-tech forums for those who have given up their children and the offspring who seek their biological parents, Dawn lives in that world of hesitant emails, exchanged photos, and DNA test results – components of the many contacts that often lead nowhere. Her sons and parents urge her to forget the past, though they’ll sometimes get drawn into these searches as well.
Ultimately, Dawn forgives her younger self for the choice she made in the heat of shame and parental disapproval. The location of the former church-run dwelling in Venezuela where she had given birth had long been a mystery. A return there sparks tender reminiscences of those fleeting moments between mother and child when, briefly, they were together.
The protagonist’s story is set against a backdrop of differences, both personal and cultural. The adult Dawn looks back at her younger, naïve self. A young woman’s eagerness for sexual adventure contrasts with the mature narrator’s crumbling marriage and later divorce. Dawn’s privileged childhood in Trinidad diverges from her adult life in London. Her family’s successful fruit juice business, for example, gave her a certain status. “You know who I am, right?…You know who my father is?” Dawn asks the masked men who whisk her away by night to Venezuela (10).
In England, her life is more typical. Even if she has trained as a physician and her husband is a doctor, divorce changes her comfortable life. She leaves a spacious home on a street “shaded by old beech trees” (37) to live on her own and work in a real estate office. The narrator comments on other differences as well. The expansive islanders of her youth are juxtaposed with the “polite-polite” English of her adult life. Trinidad’s economic and political strife render other destinations desirable; even when Dawn has marital problems, her family encourages her to stay in England.
This story echoes the emotions one finds in many women’s texts of loss. Oriana Fallaci’s classic “Letter to a Child Never Born” (1975) grapples with the pain of miscarriage. Alice Munro’s Juliet trilogy from the collection “Runaway” (2004) delves into a daughter’s disappearance. Colombe Schneck’s “Seventeen” (2015) explores the trauma of abortion. “Love Forms” is, indeed, very much a woman’s story, as Adam’s narrator feels the “absence” of her daughter “somewhere in my abdomen” (180).
Such conjuring up of the absent child is a common technique in contemporary texts of trauma. As Dawn brings home groceries, for instance, she envisions her daughter who would now be forty-two doing the same. We read: “I like to imagine her still in Venezuela…. She might be carrying grocery bags now, just as I was…. As I moved around my own kitchen, putting away parsley, onions, milk, I felt almost as if she were in the room with me. I’m dreaming, I guess” (46-47).
Colombe Schneck’s adult narrator makes a similar move in “Seventeen.” She imagines her child as a boy and questions what his life and her own life might have been had she given birth: “I go to live in London and then in New York. I imagine getting in touch with him, but I don’t, not a letter, not a phone call. What could I possibly tell him?… ” (50). On the one hand, because of gender similarity and because Dawn knows she gave birth to a girl, Adam creates a parallel scene. On the other hand, Schneck’s episode remains within the realm of pure conjecture, emphasized by false starts and questioning. Yet both works explore lingering questions that result from struggles particular to women’s lives and their bodies.
Adam’s easygoing, conversational style invites readers along on the protagonist’s journey. There are direct addresses to the reader, as when Dawn discusses studying a map of Venezuela: “Try it. Look at a map, zoom in. Everywhere you look is forest” (14). As if her narrator is talking to a friend, she uses frequent asides (“by the way”). She comes back to previous points (“I may as well just say the names of the neighborhoods” 38). She fills her text with colloquialisms. When Dawn’s brother urges her son Finlay to give up a life of “working-working…pressure on your tail” to come live in the Caribbean, Finlay responds, “‘Doh pressure meh!’…in the Trinidadian way, in the same rhythm as the old-time calypso” (241), and everyone laughs. Repetition and local cadences, along with the familiar tone, add color and authenticity to the text.
Adam also creates unique visual images as she builds character portraits. After many years, for example, Dawn tentatively broaches the sensitive subject of her daughter with her mother: “I’ve been wondering. You remember Venezuela. Where is the child now, do you know?” (150). As the narrator describes the mother’s anguish – breaking into a rash, pulling over as they drive home – it is her hand movements that are most memorable: “[W]hile she talked, from time to time she put up her hands near her head and she flapped the hands, distressed, as if flapping away a swarm of bees” (152). Later, the thought of raising this issue again with her mother evokes the same image – “the time she flapped her hands around her head” (166).
Finally, this is a text about the workings of memory. Adam’s nimble handling of time frames and her frequent use of flashbacks reminds us of her first novel “Golden Child” (2019), another text about a lost child but from the father’s perspective. In “Love Forms,” there is not only the space between “[n]owadays” and “back in 1980” (6), but an understanding of how memories remain and change form. In recounting a 2003 trip back to Trinidad, the narrator emphasizes first faulty memory (“That summer, If I remember correctly” 187), then modified memory (“I’m paraphrasing” 190), then, like Proust’s madeleine, how memories are evoked. While taking a pirogue ride along the Caroni swamp, Dawn recognizes the feel of mangrove roots in the water: “I found myself…taking a firm hold of [the root]…. I remembered walking once on roots just like those, in the dark, by torchlight. The memory came over me fully, just as if I were there again, in Venezuela” (194). Her past trauma invades her present (“I remembered now” 194).
Lastly, Adam underscores the joy of memory. When Dawn is finally able to confront her past directly by returning to the Venezuelan home where she had lived and given birth, she finds consolation. She recalls the night after the baby was born – hearing her incessant cry and going to pick her up: “I pressed her warm little body against my own…. Where have you been? she seemed to be saying. I called and called for you!” (271). The imagined “conversation” humanizes the child, highlights their relationship, and allows Dawn to mother, if only for a moment. So common in women’s texts of loss, it is the adult woman who ultimately comes to self-awareness: “[I]t does seem to me now, as I get older, that to remember the past is its own gift” (268).
Claire Marrone is Professor of French and Italian at Sacred Heart University, where she teaches courses in French/Francophone and Italian language, literature, culture, and film. She holds a Ph.D. in French and Italian from the University of Pennsylvania, and joined Sacred Heart in 1992 after teaching at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Paris X, the Frères Lumière University in Lyons, France, and the Bryn Mawr College/University of Pennsylvania Italian Studies Summer Institute in Florence, Italy. In addition to her book “Female Journeys: Autobiographical Expressions by French and Italian Women,” Dr. Marrone has published numerous articles on works from the nineteenth century to the present.
