How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?

Therapist Magda Eklund has organized her life around routines, patients, and familiar colleagues. The death of her closest friend, Sara, unsettles that structure, but a discovery in Sara’s journal disrupts it completely: plans for a road trip to celebrate Magda’s seventieth birthday. Magda decides to make the journey with Sara’s ashes beside her. Encounters along the route, including a visit with her sister and a meeting with another woman, draw out questions she has kept carefully contained. Grief becomes inseparable from reconsidering the friendship she has lost and the desires she has left unexplored. The novel follows an older woman confronting sexuality, memory, and the possibility that understanding her past might change what she wants next.