Since Rachel Cusk’s ground-breaking memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, was published in 2001, books about the reality of motherhood have proliferated. Recently, however, the subject of whether to become a mother or not at all has been foregrounded in fiction. Cusk’s book, in her own words, “set out to describe the physical events of childbirth and early motherhood” and she was castigated for it — with one reviewer suggesting that if everyone read her book, the propagation of the human race would basically end as it made the whole business sound so unpleasant.
“Complaining” about motherhood is now commonplace, as it should be — from Mumsnet talk forums to bestselling fiction. Claire Kilroy’s coruscating novel Soldier Sailor (2023) is possibly the most striking new example: the narrator briefly leaves her newborn son in a forest glade after a vitriolic row with her husband. She believes she is protecting her child from the bleakness she feels inside by abandoning him, albeit temporarily. One reviewer described Soldier Sailor, approvingly, as “a book-length panic attack”. Another has called it “one of the finest novels published this year”. The intensity of motherhood as an experience seems to be summed up by the narrator addressing her child toward the novel’s conclusion with the words: “I wasn’t scared of dying until you were born.”
But there is another vein of novels published recently which explore whether being a mother or not is a viable choice. Sheila Heti’s novel Motherhood (2018), in which the narrator decides between remaining childfree or becoming a mother, was a precursor to these. The overturning of Roe v Wade, however, that occurred in the United States in June last year seems to have caused a mini explosion in novelists writing about the contemplation of motherhood, and abortion in particular. These include the autofiction Reproduction by Louisa Hall (2023) whose narrator becomes pregnant three times but only one of these pregnancies results in a longed for child. After this she reflects “Some women, I thought, experience their reproductive years as a time of joy and plenty; others move through them in fear of an unwanted pregnancy. For other women still, those years are a revolving door between losses.” The narrator is also aware that because she lives in Montana, she can have these potentially life-saving procedures that are not available to women in other North American states. In particular, she mentions that post-miscarriage treatments are banned in other states because of the perceived blurred lines between them and abortion which mean, horrifically, that “the woman is forced to carry her empty egg sac for years”.
The writer Melissa Febos has acutely noted of this novel, “Reproduction exquisitely captures the lunacy of inhabiting an animal body with a human mind.”
The narrator of Chloë Ashby’s second novel Second Self, which was published last week, is equally grappling with this dilemma but from the perspective of being unsure whether or not she wants a child at all. When I asked Ashby about why she wanted to tackle this subject matter now she said, “In terms of why now, I think there’s something jarring about the overturning of Roe v Wade and the advances in technology when it comes to fertility, particularly egg freezing and IVF. There are more options available to women than ever, and yet we’re still having to battle to have a say about our bodies.”
The main character in Still Born is so keen to avoid motherhood that she gets herself sterilised
She went on to say, “I also think Covid and its shadow play a part. I wrote the majority of Second Self during lockdown — when time seemed to stand still, but a woman’s inner body clock kept ticking. Fertility treatments were paused. Lockdowns affected access to abortion. Finally, I think there have been brilliant books in recent years on the wildly varied experiences of motherhood, but few that make room for the often limbo-like experience of not-wanting and wondering and wishing that can come before motherhood.”
It doesn’t seem a coincidence that novelists are homing in on this limbo at a point in history when it feels more fraught to become a parent than at any time since the Second World War. The cost of living crisis means that many people who want children simply cannot afford them or are postponing having children partly because of these financial pressures and are then experiencing fertility issues. This includes an increase in male infertility: a review of global trends in sperm count was published in 2022. It showed that sperm counts fell on average by 1.2% per year between 1973 to 2018. From the year 2000, this rate of decline accelerated to more than 2.6% per year.
This isn’t just about sperm counts of course though — as Zadie Smith has said, the decision to have a child seeming like a choice at all, let alone a fulfilling one, is relatively new. In an interview, she said, “If we ask our mothers and say ‘Did you intimately and profoundly desire children?’ They just say, ‘No I just had a child, I was 20, it’s what everybody did.’”
At this point in history it feels more fraught to become a parent than at any time since the Second World War
Emma Hughes’s second novel It’s Complicated has just been published and in it, its main character, Dee, considers having a child with a platonic friend. The book also contains a relatively light-hearted abortion and when I asked Hughes about this she said, “I consciously set out to write a character for whom the decision to have an abortion is very straightforward. This character has always been sure that she doesn’t want children, but although it’s an easy choice for her to make, it’s not an unemotional one. I think that’s the reality for quite a lot of people who have abortions.” When I asked her why she wanted to write about this subject now, the threat to abortion rights cropped up again: “The overturning of Roe v Wade and the consequent eroding of people’s right to decide if and when they want to become pregnant was very much on my mind as I was writing this particular plot-arc. Without access to safe, legal reproductive healthcare, which is no longer something that any of us can take for granted even in the UK, it would have looked totally different”.
The recent case in the UK of a mother-of-three who was jailed for more than two years for inducing an abortion after the legal limit means of course, that this is very much a live matter on these shores. And novelists seem sure to keep writing about it, from the abortion featured in Jodie Chapman’s Oh, Sister this year to the main character in Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, published last year, who is so keen to avoid motherhood that she gets herself sterilised. And we need these writers to keep exploring the decision to become a mother or not if we are save ourselves from this becoming another issue consumed by culture wars. As Zadie Smith has said of choices around parenthood: “if it ever comes up in an article on the internet, it will get 700 comments. People screaming at each other about whether or not they have children or should have children or want to have children or are not going to have children”. We would all do well to fight against this becoming such a reductive debate.
