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Excerpt from «MIDDLER» by Marlene Lee

I knew the letter was from my daughters the minute I opened the mailbox. I stopped to read it beside the highway. The Kansas day was hot and yellow, like the day before and the day before that. But standing on the dirt shoulder, I began to notice the brightness and heat. Noticed the trembling shadows the cottonwoods threw onto the letter. It had been a long time since I’d noticed anything. The letter woke me from a long sleep.  

Back at the house I laid it on the table beside the salt and pepper shakers. My father rocked in his chair. My mother shifted one leg on the day bed.

«Jean and Madeleine will visit in August,» I said, and walked over to the wall calendar distributed by the funeral parlor. I tore off June and July.  “They’ll be here Tuesday, August 2nd.” It was 1964. 

For years I’d imagined my ex-husband and daughters caramelized in hot peach juice in the orchard country north of Sacramento. We have hot summers in Kansas, too, but we don’t caramelize. We’re not fancy. We just sweat, though when I was twenty-six and moved back in with my parents, I didn’t even do that. I was beyond not-fancy. I was nearly dead. I didn’t care about anything. Heat or cold. Night or day. And I didn’t expect anything.  Expected nothing from my parents except shelter. Wouldn’t have been surprised if my children forgot me. Was surprised when they answered the occasional letter I wrote. Jean wrote for both of them. “Madeleine and I are fine,” she would say, “and hope you are the same.” Never anything about their father or stepmother. Once in a while a real feeling would slip through. “We have new neighbors. They are really nice, especially the mother. She made us cookies the other day. She told me I have pretty hair.” 

My father tried to interest me in the world again. He would sit in his rocking chair by the kitchen window when the chores were done and watch the sky. «It’s raining off to the north,» he would say. Because he asked me to, I would look through the rippling glass of the old window and see the dark slant of water, one end attached to the sky, the other driving straight into the prairie. In Western Kansas it can rain hard ten miles away. You sit at the window, silently crying for moisture because your wheat hasn’t filled, and watch the rain that won’t move toward your fields.

I left my father rocking, my mother lying on the day bed, and went out to the hen house to gather eggs. I tried to imagine what my daughters liked to talk about now that they were grown. I used to sing to them. I started one of the lullabies, «When the bat’s on the wing and the bird’s in the tree,» but my voice was so thin and dry the chickens ruffled their feathers.

Book Description of «MIDDLER»

In the heartland of Kansas, old wounds, lost family, and self-discovery converge in this riveting exploration of identity and redemption.  Set in the post-WWII era, Middler follows Hazel Johnson Middler, a woman who, years ago, abandoned her marriage and children to carve out a solitary existence on her family’s remote farm. When her nearly grown daughters arrive from California, it’s Jean, the eldest, who gently coaxes Hazel back into the world, beginning with a single college class. What starts as a reluctant step into society becomes a journey of transformation, challenging Hazel to confront her past, reclaim her identity, and open herself to love again.  Alongside Hazel’s journey, there’s Jim Nylund—both a new beginning and a challenge for Hazel, testing her ability to navigate a relationship that offers both love and the painful echoes of her past choices. Meanwhile, a parallel story unfolds as Jim’s runaway daughter, Divonne, takes her own path to California. As Divonne grasps for the Middler family identity she longs for, Hazel and Jean confront the very legacy they’ve fought to escape, bringing the generations into a delicate, surprising reconciliation.  Rich in themes of estrangement, reconciliation, and the resilience of the human spirit, Middler is a moving, multi-generational tale of what it takes to find—and embrace—one’s true self. 

Praise for MIDDLER

From “Meet in the Middle,” by Aarik Danielsen, Columbia Daily Tribune, Sunday, July 20^th, 2025

MIDDLER, Hazel’s story, is the Columbia-based author’s latest novel, out earlier this year thanks to Stephen F. Austin University Press. Like most of Lee’s oeuvre, the book’s plot is driven as much as anything by personal growth, the kind of rebirth or reawakening that takes place by degrees.

“I was like a foot that’s gone to sleep, or more like a whole leg that moans when it’s coming back to life,” Hazel opines early in the book.

MIDDLER followed Lee across times and places, with the novel forming and reforming over a span of years. The story also splits settings Lee knows full well: a Western Kansas farm that resembles her grandparents’ plot and the sprawling San Francisco she once called home.

Hazel also becomes entangled with Jim, a man who lost track of his own daughter years ago. As Hazel moves around and through her steadfast immediate family, her social-climbing former in-laws, and Jim’s restless existence, abandonment and repair do an awkwardly endearing dance.

. . . And this reflects the truest theme of MIDDLER and Lee’s catalog more broadly: learning to see yourself and others more clearly. This is the sort of large-as-life fiction that interests Lee and animates her pen.

MIDDLER is available from Texas A&M University in paperback format. You can order the book HERE.

Author’s Biography

MARLENE LEE holds a BA degree from Kansas Wesleyan University, an MA from the University of Kansas, and an MFA from Brooklyn College. When she’s not reading, playing the piano, or talking to other writers, Marlene Lee holds down a table at a local coffeehouse in Columbia, Missouri, confronting blank pages during business hours and postponing the inevitable with another cup of coffee. Before writing full-time, she carted her stenotype machine from place to place (eventual settings for her fiction) in a moveable feast of court reporting: Brookings, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; Chico, California; San Francisco; and New York City. She now lives in Columbia, Missouri. Before her freelance court reporting career, she taught children’s special education, high school English, Freshman and Sophomore college English, and vocational school classes in stenotype. Always and in-between, she was writing short stories and novels, accumulating publishable manuscripts before being actually published in 2013.