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I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TELL YOU THIS
A complex family drama with a Manhattan family court judge at its center.
I Don’t Know How to Tell You This focuses on Judge Rachel Sugarman and her life both inside and outside the courtroom. Rachel is part of a close Jewish family whose lives are marked by significant emotional challenges, including the painful recognition that her beloved husband is slowly being diminished by memory loss, and the past trauma of her mother-in-law, a prickly Holocaust survivor who, in old age, continues to struggle with her grief.
Rachel’s career as a judge and the power she wields in her courtroom offer an intimate look at a woman navigating what is still, in the 21st century, a profession most often dominated by men. The novel explores the very topical issues of child and spousal abuse, which color the dark undercurrent of the courtroom scenes. And though it reflects serious issues, there is very clearly a pitch-black comic sensibility at work throughout the novel. By turns sad and touching and quirkily humorous, I Don’t Know How To Tell You This is vintage Marian Thurm.
I Don’t Know How to Tell You This focuses on Judge Rachel Sugarman and her life both inside and outside the courtroom. Rachel is part of a close Jewish family whose lives are marked by significant emotional challenges, including the painful recognition that her beloved husband is slowly being diminished by memory loss, and the past trauma of her mother-in-law, a prickly Holocaust survivor who, in old age, continues to struggle with her grief.
Rachel’s career as a judge and the power she wields in her courtroom offer an intimate look at a woman navigating what is still, in the 21st century, a profession most often dominated by men. The novel explores the very topical issues of child and spousal abuse, which color the dark undercurrent of the courtroom scenes. And though it reflects serious issues, there is very clearly a pitch-black comic sensibility at work throughout the novel. By turns sad and touching and quirkily humorous, I Don’t Know How To Tell You This is vintage Marian Thurm.
252 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 15, 2025
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July 23, 2025
Incisive social commentary on family dysfunction and relationship challenges delivered with wit and wisdom (Manhattan, present-day): Marian Thurm has a keen-edged writing style.
In I Don’t Know How To Tell You This, her ninth novel (she’s also written five story collections), she delivers a hard-hitting story on the serious consequences of behaviors and decisions in her strong female character’s highly-charged lives – professional and personal – with wit and wisdom.
Rachel Sugarman is a female judge making weighty judgments in a demanding, emotionally and morally challenged Manhattan family courtroom. She’s just as committed to her husband Jonathan of forty-five years. He’s recently retired from teaching creative writing to young, curious, bright minds at Yale University (one of the universities where Thurm has also taught creative writing) coinciding with his exhibiting odd, out-of-character outbursts signaling his mental decline. (The first early on and ill-timed, when they were in Paris romantically celebrating their anniversary.)
In both situations, Rachel is in command. In the courtroom, she’s viewed as a “God.” In her marriage, a woman who has kept her eye on the ball in taking a long view of compromise to sustain a marriage to a man she loves. A resilient woman who demonstrates strength. The same personality traits called for in her courtroom, where “petitioners,” case-by-case, display outrageous conduct and present accusations of domestic abuse, violence, abandonment, revealing unfit parenting and an inability to control anger creating toxic and life-threatening home environments. Rachel must separate families in the best interests of protecting children chiefly, also their threatened mothers. (There’s also a case involving a girlfriend’s protection from her dangerous boyfriend, and one concerning a 95-year-old grandfather).
If you can’t find a way to laugh at the absurdity of these so-called families, the madness, you’ll cry. How did modern families become so dysfunctional? When did so many families start falling apart? Thurm indirectly asks.
A sign hangs over Rachel’s courthouse: “THROUGH THE GUIDING LIGHT OF WISDOM AND UNDERSTANDING SHALL THE FAMILY ENDURE.” Upon seeing it, she muses, “Let’s hope so,” giving us a sense of what she and the reader are in for: a pathetic, heartbreaking circus. “Even on the best of days . . . when everything in the universe is perfectly aligned, even then, half of Manhattan probably has just cause to light upon her courtroom.”
Politically, Thurm also cunningly raises ever-so-timely questions about the value of public service jobs, noting Rachel could have chosen a far more “lucrative” career, her friends subscribing to that goal. In another scene, Rachel attends her fiftieth reunion, bumping into a classmate she barely remembers until he mentions the name of the seminar, “Problems in American Democracy.”
Outside the courtroom, Rachel is seen just as faithful. Up until now, she’s been an “optimist.” “Doesn’t everyone live with disappointments, both large and small? Isn’t the mostly affectionate give-and-take at the very heart of their together still something to be treasured?”
Thurm explores tough questions about big things in life – the jobs we choose, partners, marriage, motherhood, morality, cruelty, inhumanity. If you’re thinking this may all sound too depressing, Thurm brilliantly deflects, mixing up the dynamics, finding a way more than you’d expect to make you smile and chuckle at the insanity besides the sadness.
One of the epigraphs tips us off on what’s to come with Jonathan, who says, “Old age is only for young people; it’s just too hard for old people.” Clever, but bearing out woefully.
Jonathan is sixty-nine, two years older than Rachel, who isn’t ready to retire in spite of the profound societal troubles she must contend with. Turns out Jonathan wasn’t ready either. In one of many poignant scenes, he answers his own former student writing assignment to expound on, “What do I know?” Student replies no less sorrowful than Jonathan’s: “I know what it’s like to miss my old life.”
Page by page, the novel shoots out truisms on life.
Jonathan’s deterioration makes Rachel’s upbeat, assured attitude more difficult day-by-day, with no end in sight. Weeks, months, and two years go by, and you can’t help but wonder when will she break? What does a wife do when she finds her husband blurting out hurtful comments? How long can you brush it off?
A charming example of Thurm changing the conversation is when the Sugarmans leave their Upper East Side home to visit their son Matthew in Brooklyn, their only child, greeted by their precocious, older grandchild, ten-year-old Luna who says the darnedest things. She’s the apple of Jonathan’s eye. Another is nostalgic, looking back fondly on Jonathan’s love of music when he played in a band called Psychedelic Mushrooms. Reminding us that Rachel and Jonathan are baby boomers.
Matthew’s story is not all charmed, though. He lack’s his mother’s ability to accept and move on. He’s finally found the right woman to love, Ellyn, his third wife, and should be blissfully contented. Sometimes he is, but increasingly he’s become obsessed with a blue tattoo on her underarm that’s a reminder of her first husband who died in an accident, making her a widower at thirty-one.
The blue tattoo on Ellyn’s arm is an exponentially more horrific reminder that Jonathan’s mother Szófia, a Hungarian name that means wisdom, had a tattoo like that painfully reminding him that she’s a Holocaust survivor. Kept from him until later in life, understandably not something any parent wishes to tell their child, except he grew up not knowing why his mother wasn’t warm and fuzzy. Rachel’s compassion for her mother-in-law’s trauma runs deep. She’s close with her and accepts whatever she’s done and says, whereas Jonathan has been scarred. The haunting theme reminds us of the psychological damage Rachel sees in child custody cases, but on an entirely different scale. “Grief is a private affair.”
We can’t help but be blown over that Jonathan’s mother survived indescribable suffering at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and is “still razor-sharp” at the age of 97, while her roughly thirty-year younger son is no longer despite his intellectually stimulating career.
Rachel wants “dignity” in her courtroom. A measure of dignity is what Rachel, Jonathan, and readers wish for as Jonathan’s decline continues. What we all wish for our loved ones and ourselves.
In I Don’t Know How To Tell You This, her ninth novel (she’s also written five story collections), she delivers a hard-hitting story on the serious consequences of behaviors and decisions in her strong female character’s highly-charged lives – professional and personal – with wit and wisdom.
Rachel Sugarman is a female judge making weighty judgments in a demanding, emotionally and morally challenged Manhattan family courtroom. She’s just as committed to her husband Jonathan of forty-five years. He’s recently retired from teaching creative writing to young, curious, bright minds at Yale University (one of the universities where Thurm has also taught creative writing) coinciding with his exhibiting odd, out-of-character outbursts signaling his mental decline. (The first early on and ill-timed, when they were in Paris romantically celebrating their anniversary.)
In both situations, Rachel is in command. In the courtroom, she’s viewed as a “God.” In her marriage, a woman who has kept her eye on the ball in taking a long view of compromise to sustain a marriage to a man she loves. A resilient woman who demonstrates strength. The same personality traits called for in her courtroom, where “petitioners,” case-by-case, display outrageous conduct and present accusations of domestic abuse, violence, abandonment, revealing unfit parenting and an inability to control anger creating toxic and life-threatening home environments. Rachel must separate families in the best interests of protecting children chiefly, also their threatened mothers. (There’s also a case involving a girlfriend’s protection from her dangerous boyfriend, and one concerning a 95-year-old grandfather).
If you can’t find a way to laugh at the absurdity of these so-called families, the madness, you’ll cry. How did modern families become so dysfunctional? When did so many families start falling apart? Thurm indirectly asks.
A sign hangs over Rachel’s courthouse: “THROUGH THE GUIDING LIGHT OF WISDOM AND UNDERSTANDING SHALL THE FAMILY ENDURE.” Upon seeing it, she muses, “Let’s hope so,” giving us a sense of what she and the reader are in for: a pathetic, heartbreaking circus. “Even on the best of days . . . when everything in the universe is perfectly aligned, even then, half of Manhattan probably has just cause to light upon her courtroom.”
Politically, Thurm also cunningly raises ever-so-timely questions about the value of public service jobs, noting Rachel could have chosen a far more “lucrative” career, her friends subscribing to that goal. In another scene, Rachel attends her fiftieth reunion, bumping into a classmate she barely remembers until he mentions the name of the seminar, “Problems in American Democracy.”
Outside the courtroom, Rachel is seen just as faithful. Up until now, she’s been an “optimist.” “Doesn’t everyone live with disappointments, both large and small? Isn’t the mostly affectionate give-and-take at the very heart of their together still something to be treasured?”
Thurm explores tough questions about big things in life – the jobs we choose, partners, marriage, motherhood, morality, cruelty, inhumanity. If you’re thinking this may all sound too depressing, Thurm brilliantly deflects, mixing up the dynamics, finding a way more than you’d expect to make you smile and chuckle at the insanity besides the sadness.
One of the epigraphs tips us off on what’s to come with Jonathan, who says, “Old age is only for young people; it’s just too hard for old people.” Clever, but bearing out woefully.
Jonathan is sixty-nine, two years older than Rachel, who isn’t ready to retire in spite of the profound societal troubles she must contend with. Turns out Jonathan wasn’t ready either. In one of many poignant scenes, he answers his own former student writing assignment to expound on, “What do I know?” Student replies no less sorrowful than Jonathan’s: “I know what it’s like to miss my old life.”
Page by page, the novel shoots out truisms on life.
Jonathan’s deterioration makes Rachel’s upbeat, assured attitude more difficult day-by-day, with no end in sight. Weeks, months, and two years go by, and you can’t help but wonder when will she break? What does a wife do when she finds her husband blurting out hurtful comments? How long can you brush it off?
A charming example of Thurm changing the conversation is when the Sugarmans leave their Upper East Side home to visit their son Matthew in Brooklyn, their only child, greeted by their precocious, older grandchild, ten-year-old Luna who says the darnedest things. She’s the apple of Jonathan’s eye. Another is nostalgic, looking back fondly on Jonathan’s love of music when he played in a band called Psychedelic Mushrooms. Reminding us that Rachel and Jonathan are baby boomers.
Matthew’s story is not all charmed, though. He lack’s his mother’s ability to accept and move on. He’s finally found the right woman to love, Ellyn, his third wife, and should be blissfully contented. Sometimes he is, but increasingly he’s become obsessed with a blue tattoo on her underarm that’s a reminder of her first husband who died in an accident, making her a widower at thirty-one.
The blue tattoo on Ellyn’s arm is an exponentially more horrific reminder that Jonathan’s mother Szófia, a Hungarian name that means wisdom, had a tattoo like that painfully reminding him that she’s a Holocaust survivor. Kept from him until later in life, understandably not something any parent wishes to tell their child, except he grew up not knowing why his mother wasn’t warm and fuzzy. Rachel’s compassion for her mother-in-law’s trauma runs deep. She’s close with her and accepts whatever she’s done and says, whereas Jonathan has been scarred. The haunting theme reminds us of the psychological damage Rachel sees in child custody cases, but on an entirely different scale. “Grief is a private affair.”
We can’t help but be blown over that Jonathan’s mother survived indescribable suffering at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and is “still razor-sharp” at the age of 97, while her roughly thirty-year younger son is no longer despite his intellectually stimulating career.
Rachel wants “dignity” in her courtroom. A measure of dignity is what Rachel, Jonathan, and readers wish for as Jonathan’s decline continues. What we all wish for our loved ones and ourselves.
August 31, 2025
This is a touching and humorously quirky book about a family court judge navigating complex cases in the courtroom while dealing with the heartbreaking decline of her brilliant husband. Judge Rachel Sugarman, a family court jurist, faces challenges at work and a personal crisis at home. Her husband, a once-brilliant physician, is showing early signs of dementia. Simultaneously, her elderly mother-in-law—who carries the heavy scars of surviving the Holocaust—becomes increasingly dependent and emotionally unpredictable.
The novel intertwines Rachel’s public life in the courtroom with her private struggles, illustrating how she balances caring for others while striving to maintain her own sense of self. Rachel is a flawed, funny, and empathetic woman whose grief and resilience develop together throughout the story. The narrative seamlessly blends heartbreak with humor, making it both devastating and relatable. By the end, readers are left with the understanding that love is as complicated as it is enduring.
Against this backdrop, the author reveals how life’s sweetest bonds and sharpest fractures can coexist. These tensions play out both inside the courtroom and around the dinner table in a close-knit Jewish family, where love and pain are never far apart. This is a moving story about family, loss, and the quiet courage required to keep going when life changes faster than we would like.
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:
https://shows.acast.com/moms-dont-hav...
The novel intertwines Rachel’s public life in the courtroom with her private struggles, illustrating how she balances caring for others while striving to maintain her own sense of self. Rachel is a flawed, funny, and empathetic woman whose grief and resilience develop together throughout the story. The narrative seamlessly blends heartbreak with humor, making it both devastating and relatable. By the end, readers are left with the understanding that love is as complicated as it is enduring.
Against this backdrop, the author reveals how life’s sweetest bonds and sharpest fractures can coexist. These tensions play out both inside the courtroom and around the dinner table in a close-knit Jewish family, where love and pain are never far apart. This is a moving story about family, loss, and the quiet courage required to keep going when life changes faster than we would like.
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:
https://shows.acast.com/moms-dont-hav...
August 7, 2025
A poignant book that’s beautifully written with strong character and plot development. The way the author writes, she captures you right from the beginning with strong, relatable dialogue. It was hard for me to put down the book, and I read it in only three sittings. Even though the topics were difficult life issues, she dealt with them empathically and set a strong role model. And there’s a mixture of wit and humor interspersed along the book. I found myself wanting to mirror the way her characters lovingly dealt with various situations. A wonderful, thoughtful book that’s beautifully written. It makes you appreciate life and your loved ones.
October 25, 2025
I loved this book… I’m watching my own Mom die of Dementia and still maintain some dignity. Very tough and very affirming to read of another version of this. Every description of marriage and multi-problem families and little details of how our coworkers become part of our relational community for a time… all of it rang true. Something about the final pages had me I tears. What a nice writer.
July 24, 2025
spent the whole book trying to remember whether the father was Matthew and the son was Johnathan or vice versa. also- don't open a book with an asl "interpreter" without any research on legal interpreting
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews