Now You Know
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Synopsis
Assigned as college roommates in 1947, Frances Wilson and Libba Charles forged an unlikely friendship of opposites that ended only with Frances’s lingering death decades later. Now, Frances’s three grown daughters, who have never been close, struggle with loss and grief as they battle their personal demons. Alice is the control freak who fears she’ll have nothing to show for her life as "only a mother"; Allegra is a belligerent recovering alcoholic separated from her husband and children; Edie, the youngest, is chronically disorganized, inept, and commitment phobic.
The summer after Frances’s death, her three daughters are unwillingly reunited with Libba, a mercurial, contradictory, fascinating novelist, the seeming polar opposite to Frances. Alice, Allegra and Edie have long felt excluded from the two women’s relationship. They resent Libba for siphoning away their mother’s love and attention, for blatantly using their lives in her fiction, and suspect moreover that she assisted Frances’s dying. Adding insult to injury, Libba has inherited Creek Cabin, their beloved summer cottage in the mountains, and has moved there to work.
And also to die. Unbeknownst to Alice, Allegra, and Edie, Libba has pancreatic cancer and, having watched Frances’s protracted agony, refuses to seek treatment. When Libba summons the sisters to Creek Cabin to divide Frances’s possessions, they come grudgingly, but come they do. Libba’s terminal illness is eventually revealed, and the sisters remain at Creek Cabin because of their mother’s deathbed command to "Look after Libba."
Set against alternating flashback scenes that illuminate Libba and Frances’s history, Alice, Allegra, and Edie confront not only their own issues, but the surprising breaches, betrayals, and secrets behind an unshakeable intimacy they have simultaneously admired, envied, and resented. Until, finally, Libba charges the sisters to do for her what she did for Frances, their mother and her friend.
Now You Know is not one story, but five. The novel examines dynamics between sisters, between mothers and daughters, and the compromises and commitments women face in marriage, children, and careers. Most of all, though, it portrays not only the powerful alchemy of women’s friendship -- the devotion and details that comprise it -- but the obligations and sacrifices that love compels us to make.