This month in the Jen Hatmaker Book Club, we’re reading a novel that doesn’t just tell a story—it inhabits one.
Jen sits down with author Maddie Mortimer to talk about Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, a breathtaking and formally inventive debut that explores what it means to live inside a body that is changing, remembering, and, ultimately, letting go. At the center is Lia, a woman living with terminal cancer—but this story unfolds as a chorus, with voices that include her family, her own inner world, and even the cancer itself.
Together, Jen and Maddie explore the deeply personal roots of the novel, including Maddie’s own experience of losing her mother, and how that grief shaped the book’s emotional precision. They talk about why she chose to move beyond a traditional narrative and instead capture the feeling of illness—the disorientation, the fractured sense of time, and the way memory lives not just in the mind, but in the body.
They also tap into the book’s striking structure—the visual and sensory journey it creates for readers—and how that imaginative form is now being adapted for the stage, bringing the story full circle to Maddie’s theatrical roots.
In this conversation, we consider what it means to listen to the body as a narrator, how love shows up in the smallest moments, and why stories like this invite us to pay closer attention to the life we are living right now.
This one is tender, surprising, and quietly unforgettable.