![]() The novel also reflects the contrast between the Judaic and American relationships to time, says Horn. With Rachel’s life spanning Jewish societies-continually dying yet reborn after each disaster-from the Roman Empire to modern Israel, Eternal Life reads as a metaphor for Jewish history. While reading about advances in anti-aging for the book, Horn, who spent her childhood in suburban New Jersey and is now raising her family there, thought back to her own, repetitive domestic experience: “Who in their right mind would want to go through this again and again and again?” Immortality is not a particularly original subject in literature, but stories of eternal life, she says, “are almost never about fertile women.” In her novel, Hannah, a gifted biologist who is researching life extension, discovers that her grandmother Rachel has the telomeres of a teenager. You just keep resetting the clock: ‘Oh, it’s the first day of kindergarten again!’” ![]() I’m a mother of four young children, and when you have that many children, you keep going to preschool graduations over and over again. “Something I’ve noticed was that friends of mine with smaller families become very nostalgic as their children grow up and pass milestones,” she says. Eternal Life might be the most fantastical of Horn’s books, but it also emerges most directly from her daily life. ![]()
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