Equal Affections was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1989. The novel centers on the Cooper family: Louise, the mother, who has survived breast cancer for twenty years through a combination of experimental treatments and sheer determination; Nat, the father, a computer scientist who manages his emotional life through intellectual abstraction; Danny, the gay son, a lawyer in a stable relationship; and April, the lesbian daughter, a folk singer whose music increasingly politicizes her family’s private struggles.
The title refers to the impossible ideal of parental love distributed equally among children — and the novel demonstrates, with characteristic Leavitt precision, how unequal affections actually are, and how much pain that inequality creates. Danny, the compliant child, has been rewarded with closeness to his mother; April, the rebellious one, has been punished with distance. But compliance has its costs, and rebellion has its freedoms.
Louise’s cancer provides the novel’s temporal structure — the narrative moves toward her death while the family struggles to speak the truths that the threat of death makes urgent. Leavitt handles the medical material without melodrama: Louise’s relationship with her disease is pragmatic, sometimes darkly funny, and always specific rather than symbolic.
The novel’s treatment of homosexuality is notably matter-of-fact. Danny and his partner Walter are not in crisis about their sexuality — that crisis is over, resolved before the novel begins. Their concerns are the ordinary ones of domestic life: commitment, fidelity, the desire for children, the relationship with in-laws.
Collecting Equal Affections
First edition (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1989): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20