If you leave, try this book
A review of Margaret Hutton’s If You Leave
By Katy Gathright
Friendships between women characters in literature are so often focused on foils. The sexy friend and the mousy one. The full-time mother and the driven careerist. The booksmart scholar and the scrappy girl with emotional intelligence. Sometimes these women are sisters, sometimes dear friends, but you can often smell the opposition a mile away, whenever one woman is tightly defined in the opening pages, and you sense that the encounter with her opposite will break her down and reform her along the way.
If You Leave, the richly-drawn debut novel by Margaret Hutton (Regal House Publishing, October 2025), is the story of two women who are unlikely friends. But whereas the trope of unlikely friends usually signals a well-trod exploration of those aforementioned opposites, protagonists Lucille and Audrey offer something fresher and more relatable because they resist those neat, contrasting boxes.
Audrey is an artist, and when we meet her in Washington, D.C. during the final stretch of World War II, she is confident about her passion for drawing and painting, but generally more muted about her daily life and time in the city. Despite how interesting her day job may sound to us—she studies and repairs film reels recovered from the Axis powers—she finds it uninspiring:
“After unspooling images all week at the bottom of the Jefferson Building, she felt like an undeveloped negative herself, undefined and translucent.”
When she meets a naval doctor named Ben at a party, she falls in love quickly: It feels too quick, to both the reader and perhaps also Audrey, though his pending deployment explains some of the urgency to get married. Nevertheless, the warning signs are there.
Warning signs are all over Lucille’s life, too. She works in a secretarial pool at the Pentagon, also contributing to the war effort, but mostly she feels downtrodden. Ambivalent about the great love she left behind—a love she sacrificed her relationship with her family for—and quick to find new, life-changing trouble in Washington. I read her story between my fingers, hands over my eyes, nearly squinting in worry.
Shortly after Audrey marries Ben, he is called to serve in the war. His absence from their home opens up literal room for Lucille, who is panicking about an unplanned pregnancy, to move in and take root in Audrey’s heart. Here, as throughout the novel, Hutton relies on a series of sharply drawn images to describe their bond:
“[Lucille] had pulled over her head and clothes a high-necked green taffeta gown that enwrapped her like the leaves on a tulip stem. The small lamps gave off light as lambent as candles. For a moment the air shimmered. Audrey adored her.”
When Lucille leaves her baby behind with Audrey, it’s not so much surprising—we are prepared after all by the title—as it is purely upsetting. It doesn’t have to be this way, and yet once the decision is made, it’s locked in, much as Audrey remains locked into her own marriage, despite such early indications that she and Ben are on different pages.
The novel’s tension, in many ways, springs from the fact that neither of these women are waifs. Audrey never considers giving up her art, never indicates it’s not important to her. Lucille may make decisions that frustrate us and complicate her life, but she also refuses, on some level, to give up who she is. Who they have in common drives the plot of this novel, but what they have in common is its fuel: Neither woman feels comfortable surrendering to motherhood, not for lack of love, but because of that particularly thorny combination of youth, aspiration, and patriarchy over which they have some, but not total, control.
The novel jumps back and forth between 1944 and 1973, when Lucille returns to Audrey’s life, and moves fluidly between Lucille and Audrey’s perspectives. If You Leave shines in its portrait of these two women, which is more ambitious and haunting than it needs to be to advance the plot. Lucille’s backstory in particular is quite textured and fully realized—nearly a novel in and of itself—and walks that satisfying line of explaining the character’s behavior without justifying it.
That texture feels related, possibly, to Hutton’s other vocations. She currently spends part of her time in her art studio in Pennsylvania, and was previously an environmental reporter; I don’t know Hutton’s visual artwork, but her novel is filled with an artist’s eye and a reporter’s restraint. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and also lives part-time in Washington, D.C.
Her D.C. bonafides come through in knowing details about the physical city, and in deeper ways as well. It’s easy to see Washington primarily through the lens of national politics. But a huge part of life in the city is not so much the powerbroking as it is the leaving. People come for their stint—a few years at an NGO, as a congressional staffer, or as a consultant—and then eventually drift back to their hometown, or move for graduate school, or seek a bigger, glitzier city. It is a relief, almost, to see that fluctuation depicted in fiction. All of us who live here feel the constant expanding and contracting—of friend groups, family, and professional networks.
Dreams, too, come and go. If You Leave pulls no punches as a tale of secrets and shame, but also delivers something deep and worthwhile: A few truths about complicated friendships, the gravitational pull of home, and the fact that we all, in our own way, struggle to keep our promises.
Pick up your copy of If You Leave directly from the publisher, Bookshop, or your favorite independent bookstore.
Learn more about Margaret Hutton on her website. If you happen to be in New York City, Margaret has an event tomorrow, November 12, at Coffee House Club. And if you’re reading this from Chicago, you can find her on November 19 in conversation at The Book Stall.
Margaret Hutton's fiction has appeared in The Sun, The South Carolina Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Antioch Review, and Abundant Grace. She graduated with honors in creative writing from UNC-Chapel Hill and holds an M.F.A. from George Mason University. A native North Carolinian and former environmental reporter, she now divides her time between the Washington, D.C. area and her art studio in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
Katy Gathright is a writer and a marketing director. She has been published in The New York Times, The Hopkins Review, Allium, and elsewhere. To learn more, visit: katygathright.co.
