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The Tree Doctor

In contrast to classic novels about married women who cheat on their husbands (Madame Bovary, The Scarlet Letter, The End of the Affair—all authored by men), The Tree Doctor suggests that intimacy with one’s own body and its desires is both a survival skill and a prerequisite for connecting with the wider world.

The Tree Doctor book cover

A college professor and writer returns to her hometown of Carmel, California, to care for her mother, then finds herself stranded by the pandemic. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother declining in a care facility, she becomes obsessed with reviving her mother’s garden and starts a torrid affair with an arborist. All the while, she struggles to teach (remotely) Lady Murasaki’s 11th-century novel, The Tale of Genji, which turns out to resonate eerily with the events in her life.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett headshot

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a second novel, Picking Bone from Ash, as well as a memoir, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Good-bye, and a work of literary journalism, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland. A member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars in Vermont who has also taught at the ߲ݴý Writers Conference, she spent the past two years living in Japan.

What’s not to like about a very sexy literary novel that unfolds against the backdrop of multiple real-life crises: an ailing parent, an estranged spouse, a global pandemic, and a climate apocalypse?

“At this point in my life, I was tired of reading about women who were punished,” says Marie Mutsuki Mockett on the Living Writers podcast. Listen to the whole three-question interview .

Marie Mutsuki Mockett at ߲ݴý

Join us in person or on Thursday, Oct. 23, for Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s reading and book-signing. All Living Writers events take place at 4:30 ET in Persson Auditorium. Refreshments available.

Beyond the Book

  • “Mockett's prose is beautiful, and she handles the book's heavy themes of illness and isolation perfectly, occasionally leavening them with humor,” writes Michael Schaub in this .
  • The Tree Doctor “crosses cultures—Japanese and Californian; it draws interesting parallels between flora and human experience; it explores the ravages of climate change; and it revels in the pleasures that good sex can bring even at a later age,” writes Geza Tatrallyay in the . 
  • “I had a white father who grew up in America and a Japanese mother, and very early learned the trick of relating to characters emotionally even if they didn’t look like me, which they almost never did,” writes Marie Mutsuki Mockett in  about The Tale of Genji
  • In published in LitHub, Ms. Mockett reveals that The Tree Doctor was inspired by someone’s Covid-era Twitter post: “All those people having affairs before the pandemic are now screwed.”

“Can you wake up a body the way you wake up a tree?”

Marie Mutsuki Mockett, The Tree Doctor