The Rebeccas—one a doctoral student, the other a cashier at an organic grocery store—have been separated for six months. Theirs was a volatile marriage, marred by student Rebecca’s alcoholism, but now she is sober, on her medication, and eager to become a foster parent. But in order to get approved, student Rebecca needs cashier Rebecca, who herself grew up in foster care, to pretend they are still happily married. Cashier Rebecca isn’t entirely opposed—she desperately wants her wife back if she is stable—but she has her own entanglements to manage. Despite her precarious personal financials, she has presented herself as a “provider” on an app that pairs sugar babies with sugar mamas and connected with the pregnant Charlotte. But little does she know that Charlotte isn’t expecting and isn’t in need of a romantic benefactor—Charlotte likes wearing a prosthetic pregnancy belly and is using her inheritance money to serve as student Rebecca’s (“her Rebecca”) sugar mama. The novel’s premise smacks of screwball, but the bleak interior lives of her cast keep comedy on the sidelines. Chapters alternate focus between Charlotte and cashier Rebecca, and in both, we hear how much they hate themselves and watch as myopia blinds them to the needs and experiences of others. Higgins’ prose has moments of evocative wit, such as, “Her voice sounds strained and controlled, like she is giving boarding announcements for a rocket designated to explode for the pleasure of the rich and perverse.” But she allows her characters so many flights of fancy that the line between imagination and reality is blurred, and in some scenes it’s difficult to tell what is actually happening.
