They say nothing prepares you. Before having my baby, I approached the literature of motherhood as though I were about to sit an exam. If my studies tempered the shock of birth and early parenthood, then I didn’t notice. The sheer physical and emotive force of the experience left me profoundly shaken. Words felt insufficient. And yet I kept reading – everything I could get my hands on. I wanted answers. I wanted to feel recognised. I wanted this untranslatable experience to be translated into language. Most of all, I think, I wanted restitution for all the maternal stories that had been left untold by centuries of silencing and minimising, not just for myself, but for all of us.
Books about motherhood come in waves: the recent spate only the latest in a long line of literary endeavours. In the 1950s there was Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages. The 1960s wave saw Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, alongside Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; the 1970s The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, and In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker. In the 1980s writing about motherhood became even more transgressive and imaginative, with Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. The early 2000s saw an explosion in nonfiction, including accounts by Rachel Cusk and Anne Enright. And on and on, up to the present day, where no matter how much is written about motherhood, it feels as though there is still more to say. Three novels published recently have come the closest so far to giving me what I craved: The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar, Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy, and Reproduction by Louisa Hall.
Elena Ferrante said in an interview that she felt motherhood was one of those things “whose literary truth has yet to be explored”. I’m inclined to agree with her. How does one tell the literary truth of motherhood? These latest works are voice-led, and have an interiority that lends itself to this singular psychological state. They are also, I suspect, influenced as much by autofiction and creative nonfiction as they are by other novels.
All are about relatively early motherhood, and are narrated by one mother. Were you to ask what happens, plot-wise, I would tell you: largely nothing. Except, of course, everything. A woman has a child and everything shifts. There is joy, and there is rage. It pushes her to the edge of her sanity, tears the fabric of the world she thought she knew completely apart. As plots go, I find this one highly compelling.
Recent novels of motherhood explore work and identity, creation and loss, love, ambivalence, even regret. They are political without being didactic, furious and funny. If they could be said to have one thing in common, it is their corporeality. They are all unflinchingly of the body. Take the words of the narrator in Molnar’s The Nursery, a claustrophobic tale of postpartum madness (or is it?): “My breasts tingle. A blood-filled pad between my legs needs changing.” The mother in Hall’s Reproduction, whose attempt to write a novel about Mary Shelley keeps being interrupted by pregnancy, says: “I bled and I bled. I bled with such wild abandon.” Soldier, Kilroy’s main character, is less bloody, and funnier, but the maternal body remains present: “There was too much to be done to sleep or eat. Or even go to the toilet. New mothers say this in amazement, laughing like it’s funny, when it’s not funny, and we’re not laughing: we’re bewildered, we are floored.”
“One of the many irritating things about fathers is that their bodies stay the same,” Soldier says. Soldier, Sailor takes the form of a monologue, told by Soldier, the mother, to Sailor, the son. His father is a mere visitor who intrudes on this most intimate of relationships from the outside world, “an adult place from which I’d been banished”, mostly in order to make unhelpful comments such as “Of course you can put him down.” It isn’t just our patriarchal society that has led to the husband’s displacement, however; it is also the visceral experience of birth and early motherhood, and the strength of the mother-child bond. “I shield your sleeping body with my arms, ready to proclaim to the heavens that I would kill for you: that I would kill others for you, that I would kill myself. I would even kill my husband if it came down to it.” In The Nursery, the mother reflects that “John has been a good man for as long as I have known him … And still, with the birth of Button, it was the death of John. I can’t help but make it sound as though my husband is dead when I describe him.”
It may be surprising that contemporary novels sideline the father figure so spectacularly, and yet it feels true to the experience of most of the new mothers I have encountered, even now. Kilroy is particularly sardonic on this, with Soldier standing in a playground and remarking to another mum, entirely absorbed in her playing child, upon the absence of men: “‘When it comes to unpaid labour, where are the men. It’s gender apartheid in here.’ ‘Whee!’ the woman said.”
The mother and child inhabit a domestic space that is insular and at times claustrophobic, with the man arriving like a visitor from another planet. Hall makes this explicit through metaphor, and the way she draws on science fiction. “Did all that really happen?” her narrator asks, after an intense labour scene. “It must have happened on the moon. That night, we were alone, the baby and I, in a hospital room on a new planet.”
While Kilroy and Molnar’s mother-narrators are domestically isolated in ways that feel reminiscent of Ferrante’s The Days of Abandoment, where almost all of the action takes place in an apartment, Hall’s Reproduction is as much concerned with the psychological dislocation brought about by the physical experience of motherhood. Of labour, she writes how “It caused me to feel a frantic, evil loneliness: a crazed and somewhat hysteric resentment toward every other person around, since I alone had been cast off into the darkness.” Hall draws on several literary traditions in Reproduction; her labour passages, appropriately, evoke the horror genre. (“When the next contraction passed, I got out of the cold water, dripping and slicked like a monster emerging out of the sea. I bared my teeth at the wall. I cursed my husband. I cursed the nurse.”) The section entitled Science Fiction, exploring modern assisted conception and the quest of one scientist to achieve motherhood by any means necessary, makes the link to Frankenstein explicit.
Early motherhood, with its sleeplessness so extreme that it can lead to the fringes of madness, is undeniably gothic. These novels all have elements of unreality to them, which lead the reader to question whether what is being recounted is actually happening. They explore the intrusive thoughts that can prompt a mother, usually fleetingly, to want to harm her child. That impulse to do exactly the wrong thing simply because it is possible was characterised by Edgar Allan Poe as the Imp of the Perverse, but in early motherhood it is queasily coupled with an extreme hypervigilance, a survival mechanism making you aware of all the ways in which you must protect your child. It feels groundbreaking, in these novels, to see these states explored without shame. Discomfiting too: “Let’s wring you like a wet cloth” is the “urge, direct as hunger” that strikes the narrator in The Nursery.
The new generation of women writing in English owe a debt to two who are not: the Italian Elena Ferrante and the French Annie Ernaux, both of whom have written the truth of their lives and their bodies so unflinchingly as to make other works seem wanting. They have helped to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, and their work features something previously elusive in anglophone fiction: physicality. Perhaps this is why, in Cusk’s recent short story The Stuntman (published in the New Yorker), the narrator speaks of a “double self” whose purpose was to absorb or contain all the aspects of biological femininity that can turn a woman’s ongoing life story into a problem that needs a solution, especially when she is in pursuit of autonomy and equality.
Rereading Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a brilliant nonfiction account of early motherhood published in 2001, I am struck by how disembodied it is: strikingly intelligent, but somehow detached from the physicality of the experience. This generation of mother-writers have no such qualms. “This is the first book I have written with the body,” Hall states of Reproduction. “The key is to stop wanting things,” Molnar’s narrator is told. She reflects: “All this doing and no poetry.” But all these writers have created a kind of poetry – it is a poetry of continuing to want validation and self-expression beyond motherhood, while our maternal bodies at times situate us in that animal region Cusk describes. It can be a battle, yet, despite that, one of the most jarring things I have found about becoming a mother is how humdrum and uninteresting some others believe it to be. To quote Kilroy: “We all go bustling about, pushing shopping trolleys or whatever, acting like love of this voltage is normal; domestic, even.”
Nothing prepares you perhaps, but these courageous novels come closer than most.
