What Do You Want From Me? (Apprentice House Press, 2025) by Jennifer Dupree is a poignant and heartwarming story that explores complex family dynamics, trauma, trust, forgiveness, and love. We follow Maeve and her story from childhood to motherhood, with chapters intertwining the past and present. Maeve is a strong, independent woman and doesn’t like to ask for help, even when she may need it. She is a beautifully layered character many of us can relate to.
The story begins on Halloween. Maeve’s mother, Effie, who has stroke-related dementia, has to stay with Maeve’s family because her father, Tom, has to take care of Anita, his mistress of thirty years who had fallen down the stairs that night. Maeve, who is forty-nine, tries to figure out why Anita was with Tom in the first place and how she fell down. In turn, she must confront the memories and trauma she buried for years. The truth is later revealed as the story seamlessly blurs Maeve as a child with Maeve as a mother.
The most prominent family dynamic Dupree explores in What Do You Want From Me? is that of mother and daughter. Maeve grew up having a slightly strained relationship with her mother. There was always a wall between them and Maeve felt like she couldn’t confide in Effie completely. That was why Maeve idolized Anita. When she was a kid, Maeve often went to Anita’s home to hang out; Anita was this perfect, understanding, warm mother figure Maeve always wanted. She even admits that she “loved Anita more than [she] loved [her] own mother” (Dupree 60). However, that precious friendship and the mother-daughter bond Maeve wanted shattered when she found out about the affair and realized Anita was not who she thought she was.
The relationships with these two mother figures shaped Maeve’s own relationship with her teenage daughter Paige and how she wants to be a good, understanding mother.
Maeve and Paige have a tense relationship that parallels Maeve and Effie’s in many ways; Maeve constantly worries if she is a terrible mother. While she tries her best to be someone Paige can lean on and trust, it becomes increasingly difficult to give Paige the attention she deserves with the many responsibilities that keep piling on top of each other. Maeve “feels the tug of all the people she’s supposed to be—mother, daughter, wife, employee, human being and citizen of the world” (Dupree 128). She tries to balance all of these roles in her life and do them well. She doesn’t allow herself to just sit down and cry because she feels the stress to be the best mother or daughter. The pressure Maeve puts on herself is something that we readers can relate to, even if we are not mothers. Many of us all play different parts in our own lives, do them well, and we criticize ourselves if we don’t. How do we know which part of ourselves to be first?
The couple dynamic, whether that is between a married couple or a cheating one, is the trigger in the story as these are the relationships that destroyed the family. Not only did Tom and Anita have an affair that turned Maeve’s world upside down, but she also grew up witnessing the toxic relationship between Tom and Effie. As a kid and teenager, Maeve watched them fight all the time and that’s why Maeve’s current relationship with her father is the tautest. Maeve doesn’t trust Tom at all and questions if he was the one who pushed Anita down the stairs.
Because Maeve’s memories of Tom are so full of anger, however, even she may not have realized how those emotions obscure her from the real childhood memories. This anger she feels is so immense that it makes up a large part of herself as a person.
Of course, this is where Maeve is supposed to apologize. She’s been in therapy long enough to recognize an opportunity when she sees one. She looks at her father and the words are right there, rolling around on her tongue, but she thinks of her father and Anita Haverland backlit by the firelight that day twenty-five years ago and she remembers that at least some of her anger is justified. Unless that, too, is a faulty memory.
“What would it feel like to forgive him? Wendy-in-her-head asks.
I don’t know who I’d be, Maeve says.” (Dupree 258-259)
As Maeve starts to doubt herself and her memory, it becomes clear that she can be an unreliable narrator due to the stress and mixed emotions piling up inside of her. Her feelings cloud her vision and she ends up “remembering” something that never happened. There is so much trauma, anger, and guilt Maeve experienced that she keeps questioning over and over about what happened on Halloween night and if she can trust herself to come to the right conclusions.
Maeve’s healing begins as she learns how to ask for help. When she unpacks her childhood trauma and admits feelings she buried for years, it feels like a fresh start for her. Despite having a lot to navigate through, she is able to rebuild her life and the relationships in her family because of her ability to dig deeper into how everything unraveled. She not only learns to forgive those around her, but more importantly herself, which is the biggest challenge of all. After all, we are our own worst critics.
The question “what do you want from me” is a loaded one. It’s one that people ask Maeve throughout the novel and one she asks herself constantly. What does she want from those around her? What do people want from her? What does she want from herself? But to move on, Maeve untangles her childhood, coming to conclusions she didn’t ever want to admit. Everyone makes mistakes and it’s important to realize that sometimes to heal, you must forgive. Everyone is just living their lives for the first time.
What Do You Want From Me? is available from Apprentice House Press
Marian Kohng (she/her/hers) is a proud Korean American and an Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications and a Traffic Copy Editor at a local news station in Tucson, AZ. She also has a Bachelor’s in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science and a Master’s in Marketing. She loves to get lost in a good book and will read just about anything, including the back of the shampoo bottle.