Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is author Maddie Mortimer's debut novel. Nominally, it tells the story of a woman facing death at the hands of a horrible illness. However, the book is really a meditation on life and death, as well as how illness effects those around the victim. Sometimes told through the voice of the aforementioned woman's disease, Mortimer's novel explores one fundamental question: what does it mean to be human?
In the novel, Lia, Harry, and Iris lead a seemingly normal and happy life. But Lia's illness threatens to derail their lives and causes some secrets that Lia had been hiding for quite a long time to start spilling out, threatening to break their family apart. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is, to that end, a novel about families and how they deal with adversity. Despite that, the novel is very much a love letter to the author's mother, who died of cancer when she was only a teenager. In fact, in an interview with a publication, Mortimer indicated that when she read the last twenty pages of the novel to her sister and father, they both wept.
In an interview with her publisher at the release of Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, Mortimer said that she had "learnt that a fully realised character or frank, honest dialogue can be just as poetic as a perfectly constructed metaphor, or a bit of clever word play. This, I think, is growing up. It’s realising that you have nothing to prove. It’s leaving your pretension in the hall, taking the hands of your characters, and letting them lead you through the house." That is Mortimer's ethos and a guiding principle she uses when writing. After all, it is through characters that stories are told.
Mortimer cites a number of novels as influences for Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies. Those novels include Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and Han King's The White Book - among many other different novels. And Mortimer's novel is a poignant look into illness and death, as well as the transformative effect that cancer has on the people that suffer from it and those around them.
Despite the influence of other novels on Mortimer's book, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a distinctive and deeply personal book for Mortimer and for many of the readers of the novel who felt a personal connection to the material.
