What surprised me most when I became a mother was how unfeasibly demanding the job was. This work was 24/7, three six five, and nobody even acknowledged that it was work, nor that mothers were doing it, that they were doing all of it, all of the time. You’re welcome, human race.
How had I not seen this coming? Why hadn’t I read about it? Granted, there was a big baby-shaped hole in my reading life, but still. There are mothers in literary fiction, yes, but they are generally assessed as good mothers or bad ones. Where are the novels about being the mother?
The area of nonfiction and memoir has covered this ground admirably, but I struggled to find many literary novels that engaged with the baby and toddler years. (Can anyone recommend any?) Here, in any case, is my list of 10 novels that capture motherhood in an interesting way.
1. Night Waking by Sarah Moss
A family of four relocates to a remote island to enable the husband to pursue … something about birds? He basically absents himself all day, returning home whenever he’s hungry, leaving his wife to raise their children while struggling to write her thesis. Due to the lack of a shop, she scratches around to provide palatable family meals using whatever she can find in the cupboard. Every night her youngest child, Moth, awakens with the demand: “Mummy, sing a Gruffalo. Mummy, sing a Gruffalo, Mummy sing a Gruffalo …”
2. Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
Another woman up half the night every night, another nice but useless husband. The mother does her best to submit to her new role, smiling through her exhaustion, trying not to scream – and then she starts turning into a dog. Yoder brilliantly articulates the frustration accompanying self-obliteration as well as the ways in which ostensibly sweet men shirk childcare.
3. The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
The wholesale sublimation of self required to be a “good mother” proves too much for one woman in this dark and complex novel. Leda packs in domestic life to return to academia, but abandoning her young children turns out to be a different type of violence, one which manifests decades later.
4. The Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Woman gives birth, game over. The choppy narrative style reflects the state of perpetual interruption that is motherhood. Offill sketches the pressures it inflicts on marriage and on the creative self as the mother wishes she could become an “art monster” once more. “I think I must have missed your second book,” an old friend says when he bumps into her. There isn’t one, she replies. This is Offill’s second book, fifteen years after her first.
5. After Birth by Elisa Albert
This intelligent novel is about the bawling boring baby months that feel like years, as described by an acerbic intellectual American mom. There is fury, depression, loneliness and love but it is the friendship forged between two new mothers that shines.
6. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman
This Booker shortlisted novel details the daily domestic workload and emotional terrain of a mother of older children as she works from home, baking cakes all day as a side-hustle to supplement the family income. She frets about the logistics of the deliveries she must make, about her children, climate change, gun control, her marriage. She meditates on how the death of her mother broke her, and she wonders how to deal with a passive-aggressive, survivalist-type man.
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
The mother of all motherhood novels. Sethe’s child, Beloved, may be dead but the sheer force of the role is given full voice in this unforgettable novel about the extremes a mother will go to for her child. I first read this in my teens and will never quite get over it. A novel for the ages.
8. The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
Anne Enright is brilliant on motherhood in her life-affirming memoir Making Babies, but her novels have always afforded mothers and childcare the serious literary treatment they warrant too. Her forthcoming novel, The Wren, The Wren, out in September, is immaculate on the “new, liquid impulses towards this creature in the cot” and how these liquid impulses travel through the generations.
9. Crazy by Jane Feaver
Another absent father, another mother patching in the holes at the expense of her creative self. This novel’s themes stretch beyond motherhood – it is a portrait of the artist as a young and then middle-aged woman, and a depiction of the odds stacked against women in the field of creative endeavour. Funny, philosophical, sobering and wise, Crazy is crammed with insight and laced with great sentences.
10. Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Pity poor Toby Fleishman, the good doctor who has put saving lives above getting rich. His ex-wife has done a runner leaving him holding the kids. So far, so Great American Novel. But then, after Rachel Fleishman has been dealt a good sound judging, the writer flips the narrative to include the female perspective and a Greater American Novel is born.
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