Is queerness the latest publishing trend when it comes to books about motherhood? Have we exhausted all other iterations – yummy, slummy, tiger, helicopter, gentle, conscious, good enough and so on – such that queer people now offer the new take on pregnancy, childbirth and beyond? If this is the case, I’m fully behind it, because unlike those other #mumlife tropes, queerness represents a far more radical undoing of motherhood as we know it and is, of course, not a fad or a technique one can “try out”, but a deeply felt identity and lived experience. There is much that straight people can learn from having this LGBTQ+ lens put on conception, pregnancy and parenting.
Kirsty Logan’s searingly honest account of becoming a mum with her wife joins a growing number of queer motherhood memoirs. These include Claire Lynch’s Small, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Michelle Tea’s Knocking Myself Up. So I approached it wondering what else there was to say. What was new about two women having a baby? Why did Logan’s story need to be told? These are questions the writer herself grapples with throughout the book. By the end I was convinced not only that hers was an important story, but that her obvious struggle to tell it was really the point.
