The Responsible Party

Geek Love meets Sam Lipsyte in this rollicking, hilarious debut novel about a family of unforgettable women obsessed with securing their legacy.

Claire grew up with the legend of the Unsinkable Mounsey Women. Fanny, her great-great-grandmother, made headlines in 1915 for washing ashore in England nearly a year after her ship sank. Fanny’s daughter Sarah went to collect her mother on a British ocean liner named the Lusitania—whose sinking she, too, survived. Their improbable survivals led them to success on the vaudeville circuit and as Midwestern icons. But Claire never knew the full story—until now.

Listless, jobless and recently canceled for extolling dangerous skincare advice online that sent a reader to the hospital, Claire is surprised when a knock at the door turns out to be the police, looking for answers about a 1970s cold case they suspect her mother, Kath, may know something about. As the cops zero in, Claire demands answers from her mother.

Kath’s comically long response, which blossoms into the story of the Mounseys and their descendants writ large, moves from a Liverpudlian poorhouse at the onset of World War I to a Lake Michigan lighthouse in 1971 (when “sex was freer and McDonald’s fried their potatoes with beef tallow”) to present-day Chicagoland, and along the way, offers Claire a richer understanding of everything she shares with the complicated, resilient women she descends from.

Replete with inappropriately old boyfriends, dubious medical professionals, and more than a few boats, The Responsible Party is the story of several women, in several different timelines, trying to stay afloat.