The Cost Of Faking It Til You Maybe Make It In Pretending To Dance

Yet what she wants most in life, it seems she cannot have: a child. After a miscarriage that leads Molly to undergo a hysterectomy, she’s unsure if she’ll ever be a mother. She and Aidan begin to work with an adoption agency, and in the process must fill out information about their families, their backgrounds, and what qualifies them to be good parents. Molly creates a pretend origin story, because even her husband doesn’t know where she really comes from. 
Chamberlain shifts from modern-day San Diego to Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1980s to shed light on Molly’s childhood. She grew up in Morrison Ridge, on property her family has lived on for generations, all of her kin a short bike ride away. Her father is a therapist behind the development of “pretend therapy,” which states that if you pretend to be the opposite of what you are, you will become exactly what you want to be: If you’re scared, pretend to be brave.
The philosophy is apt for her father, whose MS has progressed to the point where he only has mobility above the neck. His assistant, Russel, must help him with the most mundane of tasks, from eating to relieving himself, but he maintains his sense of humor and softness for his wife, Nora, and daughter, Molly. He pretends to be happy, and Molly pretends to believe him.
A former social worker, Chamberlain reveals the complexity of dysfunctional families and how they operate. She’s able to capture family mythology: the stories we believe and are afraid to ever question. Because life at Morrison Ridge is not as tranquil as it appears to be. Molly’s family, made up of a long line of aunts, uncles, and her omnipresent grandmother, are at odds with each other over what to do with their land. Alcoholism runs in the family, and their habit of turning away from secrets seems pathological. Molly’s birth mother, Amalia, lives at Morrison Ridge in the “slave quarters” on her father’s land, to the discomfort of Nora, Molly’s adoptive mother, and the shame of her grandmother. Central to Pretending to Dance is the question, Is being able to pretend a gift or a curse? Is the presentation of perfection what’s really damaging us all?
Drifting back to the San Diego present, Molly grapples with whether she’s ready for an open adoption. Shame from her own upbringing makes her believe she doesn’t deserve a stable family. When talking on the phone to Sienna, whose expected child she may adopt, Molly realizes she literally has one foot inside the baby’s nursery, and another out the door. She expects everything to fall apart; she’s afraid to trust that she deserves good things.
Molly is an unreliable narrator, and at times difficult to sympathize with. She holds onto her anger like a petulant child, and in many ways, her entire worldview is stunted: she can’t let go of what happened to her at Morrison Ridge, and as a result has remained as emotionally charged and self-obsessed as an adolescent. Chamberlain gives us a protagonist who chooses to desert her birth family in order to start her own life, but is never truly free from her past. Aware of this, her husband Aidan encourages her to go back home, telling her, “You can’t let your past get in the way of your future any longer.”
And while the reader’s patience may run thin with Molly, Chamberlain is at her best in scenes between her and Sienna. They offer heartfelt investigations into the economic circumstances that make adoption inevitable, and the difficult choices both birth and adoptive mothers must face. Chamberlain creates an intimate portrait of the hell endured on both sides of the adoption process, without letting the reader make easy judgments.
When Sienna goes to visit Molly’s home, she’s impressed by all of the books that line the bookshelf in her nursery. She comes across the book Love You Forever, and after reading it, asks Molly, “Which one of us is our baby going to hold when she grows up?”  
Here lies one of the beautiful premises of Pretending to Dance: how do you create the groundwork for a healthy family, one that honors the past and makes room for the present? When and how do you learn to let go? The novel shows us the shades of how jealousy, pettiness, grudges, and holding onto a sense of “what’s right” can tear a family apart, and how empathy, forgiveness, and coming to terms with one’s history can give a family the freedom it needs to grow.