The Mother Act

Set against the sparkling backdrop of the theater world, this propulsive debut follows the relationship between an actress who refuses to abandon her career and the daughter she chooses to abandon instead.

Sadie Jones, a larger-than-life actress and controversial feminist, never wanted to be a mother. No one feels this more deeply than Jude, the daughter Sadie left behind. While Jude spent her childhood touring with her father’s Shakespearian theater company, desperate for validation from the mother she barely knew, Sadie catapulted to fame on the wings of The Mother Act—a scathing one-woman show about motherhood.

Two decades later, Jude is a talented actress in her own right, and her fraught relationship with Sadie has come to a scandalous head. On a December evening in New York City, at the packed premiere of Sadie’s latest play, the two come face-to-face and the intertwined stories of their lives unfold—colorfully and dramatically. What emerges is a picture of two very different women navigating the complicated worlds of career, love, and family, all while grappling with the essential question: can they ever really understand each other?

Compelling, insightful, and cleverly conveyed as a play in six acts, The Mother Act is a stylish page-turner that looks at what it means to be a devoted mother and a devoted artist—and whether it is possible to be both.

Heidi Reimer is a novelist and writing coach. Her writing interrogates the lives of women, usually those bent on breaking free of what they’re given to create what they yearn for. Her front-row seat to the theater world of her debut novel, The Mother Act, began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day. She has published in Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, Literary Mama, and the anthologies The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers.