The Heart is a Star By Megan Rogers

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The Heart is a Star By Megan Rogers: Synopsis

I received “The Heart is a Star” as a lovely gift from Megan Rogers, an author I only know in the Instagram world. And while she lives and writes on another continent, her words bridged the distance between us, as words so magically do. Before I dive in with my thoughts, here is a brief synopsis from the publisher:

Layla Byrnes is exhausted. She’s juggling a demanding job as an anaesthetist, a disintegrating marriage, her kids, and a needy lover. And most particularly she’s managing her histrionically unstable mother, who repeatedly threatens to kill herself.

But this year, it’s different. When her mother rings just before Christmas, she doesn’t follow the usual script. Instead, she tells Layla that there’s something she doesn’t know about her much-loved father. In response, Layla drops everything to rush to her childhood home on the wild west coast of Tasmania. She’s determined to finally confront her mother – and find out what really happened to her father – as well as untangle her unravelling life and lay some demons in her past to rest.

My Review:

Some books show you the fabric of a story, the intricate colors and patterns. The best ones, however, wrap you up in the warmth of that fabric.

The Heart is a Star did that for me. Initially, the suspense of Layla Byrnes’ mother’s secret kept me turning the pages, but I soon began to see the more complex layers.

Perhaps this story touched me because of the many ways it parallels my own. Like Layla, I am an adult daughter who has felt tormented by her mother’s hot and cold love, and her refusal to acknowledge my childhood trauma. I understood Layla’s frustrations, how she wrestled with a sense of daughterly duty, her intent to be loyal and loving to her mother while coping with the rage of betrayal.

There were lines that gut-punched me throughout the book:

“Who mothers the mothers with absent mothers?”

“You can be abandoned without being left.”

And as one who knows the healing power of validation after abuse, I was relieved by the vulnerability in her mother’s acknowledgement: “There are things we often know but choose not to.”

Having longed for such a conversation with my own mother, this dialog felt profoundly important. It was beautiful to hear it from a character who had otherwise been elusive, self-serving and defensive. I began to see Layla’s mother more empathetically, her duality as a victim as well as a perpetrator. How broken people sometimes perpetuate brokenness, too hollow to fully love.

At times I felt The Heart is a Star read more like a memoir than a novel, but that’s a testament to the author’s ability to create characters with nuance and dimension–like actual people! Megan Rogers did a wonderful job of showing their humanity as they fumbled and failed, sometimes making egregious mistakes. As a daughter suffering with the mother wound, I know it can be difficult to find balance as we straddle the line between blame and compassion in fractured relationships. Our need to feel heard can hinder our ability to listen.

Ultimately, we learn there are no lines, because people and life are messy. Our actions are not straight forward; they flow from a well of personal history, fears, insecurities and a lifetime of experiences. Sometimes the truth we hold dear is not fact, because we fail to see the spectrum of other truths—the perspectives and experiences of other characters within our story. As Layla’s Aunt Dawn explains in Megan Rogers’ book, “Nothing is ever one thing or the other. You have to let the joys and tragedies coexist.”

Yet another line from the book brought this further into focus as it highlighted the burden of healing we face when our lives have been upended. “Sometimes, when you spend years going down one track, it’s very hard to turn around and walk another way.”

As I pondered the lives of the author’s characters, I saw the pain of invisible daughters who carried the void of unresolved trauma into adulthood. And while their experiences of abuse and emotional abandonment may be unfamiliar to some readers, I believe this book will resonate with a broad audience. Because if we are honest, we have each failed at love in varying degrees.

See The Heart is a Star on Amazon