While reading Laura McPhee-Browne’s novel Little Plum, I often thought of Catherine Cho’s memoir Inferno, an intimate chronicle of psychosis after the birth of her child. “My son was eight days shy of his hundred-day celebration when I started to see devils in his eyes,” Cho writes in a book that renders, in frightening clarity, postpartum mental illness and motherhood’s capacity to disorient and depersonalise.
Little Plum explores similar themes: the internal conflicts of being a mother, its concealed hardships, and the strictures it can place on one’s sense of self. It is McPhee-Browne’s second novel, following her warmly received debut Cherry Beach, which won a NSW Premier’s Literary award. Where Cherry Beach takes place within the liminal period between adolescence and adulthood, Little Plum has a more mature focus: we follow a 29-year-old woman, Coral, who has been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and who falls unexpectedly pregnant after a brief romance.
