Doubleday
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An Oprah’s Book Club pick, Eric Puchner’s “Dream State” (Doubleday) is a sweeping saga that explores how choices – big and small – shape lives and families for decades.
It starts, very charmingly, with the planning for a wedding at a summer house in Montana. Cece is about to marry Charlie, but then Charlie’s best friend shows up, and their plans veer off in ways nobody expects.
Read an excerpt below.
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By the time it occurred to Cece that her mother was dying, she was dead. Even then, it seemed like possibly a mistake, like there was no way in hell her mother would have agreed to it. Cece hunched through the memorial service, unable to speak or move or smile. People hugged her, one after another, a series of random blows. At the national cemetery, she stood on the perfect lawn rolling down to a smudge of ocean in the distance, the tombstones a run of dominoes waiting to be tipped, feeling like she’d been beamed to an alien planet. She could not fathom her own fingers. It was a military burial, with guards of honor and a flag-folding ceremony and a lone bugler playing “Taps.” The long, sorrowful notes floated over the cemetery, turning everything into the tragic plot point in a movie: the gravesites and their wilting flowers, the guards of honor frozen like statues, the hole in the ground where her mother would be lowered and transformed into a skeleton. Such was the grace and beauty of the bugler’s playing that Cece, returning to Earth for a moment, couldn’t help being moved. It seemed to give form to the precious void inside her. Then the bugler stopped in midnote, as if he’d forgotten what song he was performing. He turned red with embarrassment. Finally, he took the bugle from his lips and shook it, and it played the lost note for a second, as if possessed by a ghost. It wasn’t a real instrument at all, Cece realized, but a stereo made to look like one. The thing had run out of charge. A couple of the mourners giggled. Cece glanced behind her, startled. Later, in the middle of the eulogy, the bugle began playing again from its case.
Strangeness and sorrow. Strangeness and sorrow. Cece went back to school, amazed that her life still existed. My mother is dead, she told herself, over and over, not immune to its dramatic value. It was precisely this sense of being in a play or a movie that made her death feel temporary. At any minute the play would end and her mother would be alive again, taking her to the beach like she used to every weekend; Cece would massage her head while they watched stupid shows together, dizzy with the smell of sweat and jojoba oil. (That smell! When Cece was little, she used to suck on her mother’s hair, put strands of it in her mouth.) Cece missed her so much it howled through her like a wind. She stopped eating. On the soccer field she stood there shivering, staring at the grass. Her friends, understanding at first, eventually gave up on her, stopped asking her to parties and the Galleria, to bonfires at the beach. When her father wasn’t home, Cece sometimes sneaked into his room and stripped the mattress, gazing at the orphaned sweat stain, pale as a shadow, where her mother used to sleep.
Once, the phone rang and Cece picked it up: her mother’s hair salon asking to confirm an appointment. “She died,” Cece said, perhaps too softly to be heard, because the woman on the phone said, “I believe so, yes. A coloring. Missed the last one, so wanted to confirm.” The next day, Cece drove to the hair salon and showed up for the appointment. The hairdresser didn’t question who she was. He led her to a chair, then grabbed a book of color swatches and handed it to her. Cece flipped through the book—a rainbow of tiny rabbit’s feet—and found one that matched her mother’s hair. She smelled the swatch, but of course it smelled like nothing. She cried and cried, for the first time since the funeral. The hairdresser, perhaps used to such things, ignored her. He painted and foiled Cece’s hair, then rinsed it out and revealed the hideous product of her grief.
Excerpted from “Dream State” by Eric Puchner. Reprinted with permission from Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Eric Puchner.
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