A Book A Week

At the ripe age of seventy-seven, Pepper Mills is facing what’s supposed to be her final move. After a minor car accident—one that ends with a priest confiscating her driver’s license and snipping it into pieces—her children decide it’s time for her to relocate to Vista View, a retirement community in Austin, Texas. Pepper has plenty of reasons to resist, chief among them the fact that her ex-husband (and father of her children) already lives there. Still, she chooses not to fight it. It’s easier this way.

As she settles in, Pepper begrudgingly begins to make connections. To her surprise, she finds a sense of community, and even more unexpectedly, the possibility of romance. At seventy-seven, she didn’t think she’d feel giddy about a man again, but life clearly has other plans.

And those plans are just getting started.

Pepper begins to feel unwell—exhausted, nauseated, and increasingly forgetful. At first, she blames the food, but no one else seems affected. As her symptoms worsen, her family braces for the worst: dementia, cancer, something irreversible. But after a battery of tests, the diagnosis is something no one could have predicted.

At seventy-seven years old, Pepper Mills is pregnant.

Enormous Wings takes its title from Gabriel García Márquez’s short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, a tale in which a literal angel is treated as a spectacle rather than something sacred. It’s fitting, then, that Laurie Frankel draws a similar thread in her own work. Here, magical realism becomes a lens through which Frankel explores aging, mortality, bodily autonomy, and motherhood.