I’m a couple of years late with this, but I stumbled across Sarah Gailey’s book The Echo Wife when trying out a bookstore in Carrboro (the excellent Golden Fig), and the plot is eye-catching, to say the least. It’s going to sound like I’m giving away major spoilers with the description, but I’ll let the cover blurb speak for itself:
Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning research. She’s patient and gentle and obedient. She’s everything Evelyn swore she’d never be.
And she’s having an affair with Evelyn’s husband.
Now the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up.
Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.
How can you read that and not commit to the rest of the book?
For anyone thinking this is going to be a french farce with a lot of madcap adventures and romantic misunderstandings, no, no, no. There are many rage-inducing parallels here with all kinds of abusive relationships, most especially the ones involving someone who deliberately grooms an inexperienced underaged partner who will do what they’re told, have sex without questioning, obey without complaining, and most importantly never want anything for themselves.
The book starts with Evelyn still adjusting to her status as the soon-to-be ex-wife of Nathan, her cheating husband. She still hasn’t even unpacked all the boxes in her new town home. She’s attending an award ceremony for her innovations in human cloning – what should be the pinnacle of her career – and she’s miserable and isolated and gradually getting drunker on champagne, asking herself endless questions. Why did this happen? How could I have missed what was going on? What kind of person would do this?
We’re several chapters in before the reader finds out the extent of her husband’s betrayal, and it’s not too much longer after that before Nathan is dead, and most of the rest of the book deals with the question, “Oh God, now what do I do?”
One element of science fiction that consistently bugs me is when a cloned human inexplicably has all the memories and personality of the original. A tissue sample doesn’t contain the memories of your first childhood love or which Halloween candy you like best, I don’t care where you pulled the tissue sample from. Sarah Gailey here avoids this trope by having Evelyn’s cloning breakthrough be the method to basically install the memories into a clone. The science only gets a tiny bit handwavey at times; the technology involves making a detailed map of the subject’s brain and how they respond to stimulus, and then imprinting that on the clone’s brain as it’s being grown. A clone might not even know they are a clone at first, and their personality can be…altered, depending on what their purpose is going to be. Evelyn may consider clones as nothing more than specimens to be grown and “conditioned” and/or “neutralized” (there’s a disturbing couple of concepts that Gailey goes into in detail about), but she can’t close her eyes to the real emotions coming from Martine.
And Evelyn’s feelings towards Martine are complicated.
I couldn’t turn my back on Martine.
I couldn’t escape her, any more than I could escape myself.
Evelyn hates that Martine is basically a sweeter, kinder, weaker Evelyn, while still having some mannerisms Evelyn has spent her life trying to erase. She hates what Martine represents, the proof that her husband’s love was dependent on having her want what he wanted. We see her go through what just about every nasty breakup involves, the rage at being rejected while secretly wondering if they didn’t actually deserve to be loved if they could be dumped out of nowhere. At the same time, she sees what was done to Martine, all the ways she’s been made to suffer just so her husband could have someone to greet him at the door after work and not be distracted by things like her own career or, you know, her own life.
This is at least partly why she decides to help Martine clean up the mess Nathan dumped into their lives. That, and like a lot of people who have had horrible things done to them, she’ll be damned if her life is going to be defined by something she was never given a choice to go through in the first place.
…there was no protecting my research – my legacy – if she was discovered.
Spreading outward like ripples in a pond, or a bruise, or a blood stain (sorry, Gailey’s extremely visual writing is hard to resist), we see more and more of Evelyn’s relationship with Nathan and all the signs she thinks she must have missed. We also see the shadow of her childhood – the drive for brilliance and silence, the look in her mother’s eyes when she heard her father’s key in the door – looming over everything. The whole time Evelyn is obsessively combing through every memory, we’re watching Evelyn and Martine and their impossible plan to fix their problem. And every time I’d just about gotten comfortable with the situation, the scope of Nathan’s betrayal would expand again. And again. We watch Evelyn having to deal every time with what betrayal does to someone’s entire outlook, and whether anything she could have done would have changed anything. Or been worth the change.
There’s no winning. Either I’m a bitch who needs to control everything, or I’m an easy mark.
This is a fascinating book, an addictive book, a “just one more chapter, okay just one more” kind of book. It’s also an extremely angry book, and in the afterward Sarah Gailey goes into some of the very good reasons why. If Evelyn could be anything as simple as an author-insert character, she’s one where the character herself has taken an unflinching look at her life, at what she was willing to put up with, and all the impatience and flashes of cruelty that she just assumed everyone else had to accept about her. She questions what her life amounts to if she could go through the worst few months of her life without even one colleague noticing that anything was wrong. And she takes a good hard look at what her life and childhood had done to make her, not at fault, but uniquely vulnerable to the wrong kind of person.
The book spends quite a bit of time on the traumas that shape us, and how much control we have over either our nature or our nurture. I think this could provide a useful perspective for anyone who’s been targeted by a much older would-be lover, someone who thinks that it’s at all okay to take a person who trusts them and tries to use their own method of “conditioning” to force them into the “correct” shape.