#ReadIndies Wrap-Up: February Releases (Jukes, Spence) & Review Catch-Up (Buttery, Foust)
Good riddance to February, which added insult to injury on its final day when my in-laws’ neighbour reversed into the car we were borrowing from a book club friend and smashed the driver’s-side window. The blue skies and crocuses of recent days have been most welcome. The best I can say for the month just departed is that I managed to review 15 books for Kaggsy and Lizzy Siddal’s Reading Independent Publishers Month challenge. These came from 10 splendid publishers: Atlantic Books, Backbone Press, Carcanet Press, Counterpoint, Elliott & Thompson, The Emma Press, Faber, Icon Books, Saraband and Sort Of Books.
Mother Animal by Helen Jukes
When she found out she was pregnant, Jukes (author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings) lost herself in research, looking for parallels in the natural world. A friend had told her that “childbirth puts you more in touch with your animal side.” Her daughter was born at the start of the pandemic and so early motherhood was perhaps more than usually isolated and emotionally challenging for her. She had an unexpected C-section after the placenta failed to nourish her daughter sufficiently, and then struggled to breastfeed. “I was, I realised, a little afraid of the baby. I’d expected to feel a sense of recognition – to see in her face some sign of familiarity,” but that wasn’t the case. “She was so … other.”
The long thematic chapters present Jukes’s experiences in parallel to those of other mothering creatures with pregnancy, birth, lactation, making a home (nesting) and enlisting the help of the community. Peppered throughout are trivia she shares with boyfriend, baby and readers. Such as that burying beetles lay eggs on a carcass so their babies feed on carrion from day one. That bonobo females attend births, acting as midwives for each other. That Madrid’s storks have started eating and lining their nests with what they find in landfill instead of migrating to Africa. The “Did you know?” litany quickly becomes precious. The details are not that interesting in themselves, and not sufficiently synthesized to be meaningful. The same factoid about leopard tree iguanas is repeated seven pages apart. A significant amount of information comes from Bitch by Lucy Cooke, which I would recommend instead.
As hybrid scientific memoirs of motherhood go, Lucy Jones’s Matrescence can’t be beat. For its social and political engagement, Jennifer Case’s We Are Animals is a valuable companion. Jukes’s offering pales by comparison because her story – not having the delivery she wanted, struggling to connect with her baby, her relationship with the father falling apart – is all too common, and she doesn’t have the scientific bona fides for readers to accept her as a valid source of zoological facts.
I would make an exception, though, for the central chapter, “Forever Milk,” which might be condensed and published in a big-name newspaper as a Rachel Carson-like exposé about endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals. Like any mother, Jukes wants nothing more than to protect her daughter, but how can she when household products (waterproof clothing, non-stick pans, cleaning sprays) contain toxic chemicals and her breastmilk is sure to be contaminated? Add in microplastics and the situation is bleak. We don’t know singly, let alone collectively, what these pollutants are doing to species in the long term, but most likely they interfere with reproduction and alter behaviour. The central message of this chapter, and the book as a whole, is that animals are amazing but vulnerable. “What is this world if nowhere is separate – nowhere safe?” If you think about this stuff much, you can’t bear it. Yet it’s a truth we all have to live with. It’s a brave author who dares sit with the unthinkable.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the free copy for review.
Daughter of the Sun by Rachel Spence
The Emma Press has published poetry pamphlets before, but this is their inaugural full-length work. Rachel Spence’s second collection is in two parts: first is “Call & Response,” a sonnet sequence structured as a play and considering her relationship with her mother. Act 1 starts in 1976 and zooms forward to key moments when they fell out and then reversed their estrangement. The next section finds them in the new roles of patient and carer. “Your final check-up. August. Nimbus clouds / prised open by Delft blue. Waiting is hard.” In Act 3, death is near; “in that quantum hinge, we made / an alphabet from love’s ungrammared stutter.” The poems of the last act are dated precisely, not just to a month and year as earlier but down to the very day, hour and minute. Whether in Ludlow or Venice, Spence crystallizes moments from the ongoingness of grief, drawing images from the natural world.
The second part of the book, “Medea’s Song,” is looser in style and more dispersed across the page. It’s a feminist reinterpretation that refuses to make of Medea a simple murderess, instead redeeming her as a wise woman. “Do not call them seers or sisters // They are the owls of history // nightfliers outliers”. I’m not drawn to Greek myth updates but I expect this would be rewarding for fans of similar projects by Fiona Benson and Anne Carson. Some of the specific vocabulary from the first section recurs, linking the two in a satisfying way.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
I’m also catching up on two 2024 releases from indie publishers that I was sent for review:
Knead to Know: A History of Baking by Neil Buttery
Not only the pun-tastic title, but also the excellent nominative determinism of chef and food historian Dr Neil Buttery’s name, earned this a place in my 2024 Superlatives post. In not quite 240 pages, it achieves the improbable, producing an exhaustive history of baked goods through miniature essays about every conceivable subcategory. Although the focus is on British baking, the story begins in ancient times with the first grains and the earliest cooking technique of making griddlecakes on a hearthstone. (Speaking of which, make sure you’re prepared for Pancake Day, aka Shrove Tuesday, this week!) Across multi-part chapters about bread, biscuits and cakes, pies and puddings, and patisserie, Buttery spotlights regional specialties, many of them familiar (Cornish pasties and Eccles cakes); a few have fallen into obscurity (Gloucester pancakes and Yorkshire Christmas pyes). Some dishes’ origin stories are apocryphal, while others can be traced back to historical cookbooks.
I was fascinated by the evolution of traditional holiday bakes. “The long tapering shape of the stollen is supposed to represent the infant Christ wrapped in His swaddling.” In general, there is just the right amount of chemistry, and while in places the writing is shaky or at least poorly edited (“populous” instead of populace!), there are good quips, too: “dried fruit haters do have a miserable time at Christmas to be fair.” I read the book in bites across a number of months, which felt appropriate because it’s more a reference text for the kitchen shelf than a narrative to read straight through. Good for picking up now and then over a cup of tea.
With thanks to Icon Books for the free copy for review.
You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems by Rebecca Foust
Foust’s fifth collection – at 41 pages, the length of a long chapbook – is in conversation with the language and storyline of 1984. George Orwell’s classic took on new prescience for her during Donald Trump’s first presidential term, a period marked by a pandemic as well as by corruption, doublespeak and violence. “Rally Insurrection” is a clever erasure poem illustrating how a propagandist might rebrand the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021: instead of “a mob came to Washington to / disrupt the peaceful transfer of power,” the Ministry of Truth bulletin would read “a crowd came to Washington to fight / for their country”. “Language Matters” insists that “language / is the most dangerous weapon in any totalitarian arsenal” and warns “A dictator / might do these things, but surely not // a president.” How much more strongly does this resonate in 2025.
The second and third sections engage directly with the story of Julia and Winston – the collection takes its seemingly inapt subtitle from Foust’s appreciation of 1984’s “idea of love as a subversive act affirming free will, expression, and personal privacy”. Her bold verse also confronts the repeal of abortion rights (“Breaking News”) and toxic masculinity (“Consent: A Primer”). There are some internal rhymes and slant rhymes, as well as a few end rhymes all the more striking for their rarity. I only wish this had been published a few years sooner, when its message might have seemed timelier – though, unfortunately, it is still apropos.
Some favorite lines:
“How can a future exist if we can erase or revise the past?”
“2016, dark year / of the ascension / of our Lord the Mad Clown”
“It’s happening now, / somewhere. Not here, // not yet. But so long as Big Brother is out there— / & he will always be out there—it could, // & one day, maybe it will.”
Published by Backbone Press in the USA. With thanks to the author for the e-copy for review.
Which of these appeal to you? What indie publishers have you read from recently?
Most Anticipated Books of the First Half of 2025
As I said the other week, I sometimes wonder if designating a book as “Most Anticipated” is a curse – if the chosen books are doomed to fail to meet my expectations. Nonetheless, I can’t resist compiling such a list at least once each year.
Also on my radar: fiction by Claire Adam, Amy Bloom, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Hall, Michelle Huneven, Eowyn Ivey, Rachel Joyce, Heather Parry and Torrey Peters; nonfiction by Melissa Febos, Robert Macfarlane, Lucy Mangan, Suzanne O’Sullivan and Sophie Pavelle. (Further ahead, I’ll seek out I Want to Burn This Place Down: Essays by Maris Kreizman and The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley in July, The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn in Oct. and Tigers between Empires by Jonathan C. Slaght in Nov.)
However, below I’ve narrowed it down to the 25 books I’m most looking forward to for the first half of 2025, 15 fiction and 10 nonfiction. I’m impressed that 4 are in translation! And 22/25 are by women (all the fiction is). In release date order, with UK publication info given first if available. The blurbs are adapted from Goodreads. I’ve taken the liberty of using whichever cover is my favourite (almost always the U.S. one).
Fiction
Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud (trans. from the French by Cory Stockwell) [Feb. 11, Ecco]: I found out about this autofiction novella via an early Shelf Awareness review. It “follows one woman’s quest to comprehend the motorcycle accident that took the life of her partner Claude at age 41. The narrator … recounts the chain of events that led up to the fateful accident, tracing the tiny, maddening twists of fate that might have prevented its tragic outcome. Each chapter asks the rhetorical question, ‘what if’ … A sensitive elegy to her husband”.
The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica (trans. from the Spanish by Sarah Moses) [13 Feb., Pushkin; March 4, Scribner]: I wasn’t enamoured of the Argentinian author’s short stories, but Tender Is the Flesh was awesome. This is a short dystopian horror set in a convent. “In the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, the unworthy live in fear of the Superior Sister’s whip. … Risking her life, one of the unworthy keeps a diary in secret. Slowly, memories surface from a time before the world collapsed, before the Sacred Sisterhood became the only refuge. Then Lucía arrives.” (PDF copy for Shelf Awareness review)
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito [13 Feb., Fourth Estate; Feb. 4, Liveright]: Feito’s debut, Mrs March, was deliciously odd, and I love the (U.S.) cover for this one. It sounds like a bonkers horror take on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, “a gruesome and gleeful new novel that probes the psyche of a bloodthirsty governess. Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess—she’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children.”
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler [13 Feb., Chatto & Windus (Penguin) / Feb. 11, Knopf]: I’m not a Tyler completist, but she’s reliable and this is a novella! “It’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. First …, she loses her job … Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door expecting to stay for the festivities. He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories, a shared sense of humour – and a cat looking for a new home. … [And] daughter Debbie discovers her groom has been keeping a secret.” Susan vouches for this. (Edelweiss download / on order from library)
The Swell by Kat Gordon [27 Feb., Manilla Press (Bonnier Books UK)]: I got vague The Mercies (Kiran Millwood Hargrave) vibes from the blurb. “Iceland, 1910. In the middle of a severe storm two sisters, Freyja and Gudrun, rescue a mysterious, charismatic man from a shipwreck near their remote farm. Sixty-five years later, a young woman, Sigga, is spending time with her grandmother when they learn a body has been discovered on a mountainside near Reykjavik, perfectly preserved in ice.” (NetGalley download)
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [4 March, Fourth Estate/Knopf]: This is THE book I’m most looking forward to; I’ve read everything Adichie has published and Americanah was a 5-star read for me. So I did something I’ve never done before and pre-ordered the signed independent bookshop edition from my local indie, Hungerford Bookshop. “Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets.” The focus is on four Nigerian American women “and their loves, longings, and desires.” (New purchase)
Kate & Frida by Kim Fay [March 11, G.P. Putnam’s Sons]: “Frida Rodriguez arrives in Paris in 1991 … But then she writes to a bookshop in Seattle … A friendship begins that will redefine the person she wants to become. Seattle bookseller Kate Fair is transformed by Frida’s free spirit … [A] love letter to bookshops and booksellers, to the passion we bring to life in our twenties”. Sounds like a cross between The Paris Novel and 84 Charing Cross Road – could be fab; could be twee. We shall see! (Edelweiss download)
The Antidote by Karen Russell [13 March, Chatto & Windus (Penguin) / March 11, Knopf]: I love Russell’s Swamplandia! but haven’t gotten on with her other work I’ve tried, so I’m only tentatively enthusiastic about the odd Wizard of Oz-inspired blurb: “a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression … but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a ‘Prairie Witch,’ … a Polish wheat farmer …; his orphan niece, a … witch’s apprentice …; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer”. (Requested from publisher)
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts [13 March, ONE (Pushkin) / Feb. 18, Simon & Schuster]: Watts’s debut, The Inland Sea, was a hidden gem. Given the news from L.A., this seems all the more potent: “In November 2018, Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest … [w]hile wildfires rage. … Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River … [and] beginning to suspect she might be pregnant”. (Edelweiss download)
O Sinners! by Nicole Cuffy [March 18, One World (Random House)]: Cuffy’s Dances, which was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize, was very good. The length of this sophomore novel (464 pages) gives me pause, but I do generally gravitate towards stories of cults. “Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist reeling from the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed in a cult called The Nameless [b]ased in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic [Black] Vietnam War veteran.”
The Accidentals: Stories by Guadalupe Nettel (trans. from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey) [10 April, Fitzcarraldo Editions / April 29, Bloomsbury]: I really enjoyed Nettel’s International Booker-shortlisted novel Still Born. “When an albatross strays too far from its home, or loses its bearings, it becomes an ‘accidental’, an unmoored wanderer. The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event. … Deft and disquieting, oscillating between the real and the fantastical”. (PDF copy for Shelf Awareness review)
Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin [24 April, Manilla Press (Bonnier Books UK)]: “Brought up in a devout household in Ireland, Jay is now living in London with her girlfriend, determined to live day to day and not think too much about either the future or the past. But when she learns that her beloved older brother, who died in a terrible accident, may be made into a Catholic saint, she realises she must at last confront her family, her childhood and herself.” Winner of the inaugural PFD Queer Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize Discoveries Award.
Heartwood by Amity Gaige [1 May, Fleet / April 1, Simon & Schuster]: I loved Gaige’s Sea Wife. “In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. … At the centre of the search is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who is managing the search on the ground. While Beverly is searching, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective.”
Are You Happy?: Stories by Lori Ostlund [May 6, Astra House]: Ostlund is not so well known, especially outside the USA, but I enjoyed her debut novel, After the Parade, back in 2015. “Nine masterful stories that explore class, desire, identity, and the specter of violence in America–and in American families–against women and the LGBTQ+ community. … [W]e watch Ostlund’s characters as they try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and responsibilities.” (Edelweiss download)
Ripeness by Sarah Moss [22 May, Picador / Sept. 9, Farrar, Straus and Giroux]: Though I was disappointed by her last two novels, I’ll read anything Moss publishes and hope for a return to form. “It is the [19]60s and … Edith finds herself travelling to rural Italy … to see her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, through the final weeks of her pregnancy, help at the birth and then make a phone call which will seal this baby’s fate, and his mother’s.” Promises to be “about migration and new beginnings, and about what it is to have somewhere to belong.”
Nonfiction
The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell by Jonas Olofsson [Out now! 7 Jan., William Collins / Mariner]: Part of a planned deep dive into the senses. “Smell is … one of our most sensitive and refined senses; few other mammals surpass our ability to perceive scents in the animal kingdom. Yet, as the millions of people who lost their sense of smell during the COVID-19 pandemic can attest, we too often overlook its role in our overall health. … For readers of Bill Bryson and Steven Pinker”. (On order from library)
Bread and Milk by Karolina Ramqvist (trans. from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel) [13 Feb., Bonnier Books / Feb. 11, Coach House Books]: I think I first found about this via the early Foreword review. “Bread and Milk traces a life through food, from carefully restricted low-fat margarine to a bag of tangerines devoured in one sitting to the luxury of a grandmother’s rice pudding. In this radiant memoir from one of Northern Europe’s most notable literary stylists, we follow several generations of women and their daughters as they struggle with financial and emotional vulnerability, independence, and motherhood.”
My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle by Rebe Huntman [Feb. 18, Monkfish]: I found out about this from Rebecca Moon Ruark and by the time the publisher offered it to me I’d already downloaded it. The themes of bereavement and religion are right up my street. “As she explores the memory of her own mother, interlacing it with her search for the sacred feminine, Huntman leads us into a world of séance and sacrifice, pilgrimage and sacred dance, which resurrect her mother and bring Huntman face to face with a larger version of herself.” (Edelweiss download)
Mother Animal by Helen Jukes [27 Feb., Elliott & Thompson]: This may be the 2025 release I’ve known about for the longest. I remember expressing interest the first time the author tweeted about it; it’s bound to be a good follow-up to Lucy Jones’s Matrescence. “When Helen Jukes falls pregnant, … she widens her frame of reference, looking beyond humans to ask what motherhood looks like in other species. … As she enters the sleeplessness, chaos and intimate discoveries of life with a newborn, these animal stories become … companions and guides.” (Requested from publisher)
Alive: An Alternative Anatomy by Gabriel Weston [6 March, Vintage (Penguin) / March 4, David R. Godine]: I’ve read Weston’s Direct Red and appreciate her perspective. “As she became a surgeon, a mother, and ultimately a patient herself, Weston found herself grappling with the gap between scientific knowledge and unfathomable complexity of human experience. … Focusing on our individual organs, not just under the intense spotlight of the operating theatre, but in the central role they play in the stories of our lives.”
The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street by Mike Tidwell [March 25, St. Martin’s Press]: A must-read for me because it’s set in Takoma Park, Maryland, where I was born. “A love letter to the magnificent oaks and other trees dying from record heat waves and bizarre rain, [activist] Tidwell’s story depicts the neighborhood’s battle to save the trees and combat climate change. … Tidwell chronicles people on his block sick with Lyme disease, a church struggling with floods, and young people anguishing over whether to have kids, … against the global backdrop of 2023’s record heat domes and raging wildfires and hurricanes.”
Breasts: A Relatively Brief Relationship by Jean Hannah Edelstein [3 April, Phoenix (W&N)]: I loved Edelstein’s 2018 memoir This Really Isn’t About You, and I regularly read her Substack. “As [Edelstein] comes of age, she learns that breasts are a source of both shame and power. In early motherhood, she sees her breasts transform into a source of sustenance and a locus of pain. And then, all too soon, she is faced with a diagnosis and forced to confront what it means to lose and rebuild an essential part of yourself.”
Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats by Courtney Gustafson [8 May, Fig Tree (Penguin) / April 29, Crown]: Gustafson became an Instagram and TikTok hit with her posts about looking after a feral cat colony in Tucson, Arizona. The money she raised via social media allowed her to buy her home and continue caring for animals. “[Gustafson] had no idea about the grief and hardship of animal rescue, the staggering size of the problem in neighborhoods across the country. And she couldn’t have imagined how that struggle … would help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled for with much of her life.” (Proof copy from publisher)
Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece by Julian Hoffman [15 May, Elliott & Thompson]: Hoffman’s Irreplaceable was my book of 2019. “In the summer of 2000, Julian Hoffman and his wife Julia found themselves disillusioned with city life. Overwhelmed by long commutes, they stumbled upon a book about Prespa, Greece – a remote corner of Europe filled with stone villages, snow-capped mountains and wildlife. What began as curiosity soon transformed into a life-changing decision: to make Prespa their home.” I know next to nothing about Greece and this is a part of it that doesn’t fit the clichés.
Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel [22 May, Jonathan Cape (Penguin) / May 20, Mariner Books]: Bechdel’s Fun Home is an absolute classic of the graphic memoir. I’ve lost track of her career a bit but like the sound of this one. “A cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont, is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a citizenry on the brink of civil war.” After her partner’s wood-chopping video goes viral, she decides to create her own ethical-living reality TV show. Features cameos from some characters from her Dykes to Watch Out For series.
Other lists of anticipated books:
Clare – we overlap on a couple of our picks
Kate – one pick in common, plus I’ve already read a couple of her others
Laura – we overlap on a couple of our picks
Paul (mostly science and nature)
What catches your eye here? What other 2025 titles do I need to know about?
Three on a Theme: Matrescence Memoirs (and a Bonus Novel)
I think of pregnancy and childbirth like any extreme adventure (skydiving, polar exploration): wholly extraordinary experiences with much to recommend them – though better appreciated retrospectively than in the moment – to which my response is a hearty “no, thanks.” But just as books have taken me to deserts and the frozen north, miles above or below the earth, into many eras and cultures, they’ve long been my window onto motherhood.
Matrescence, a word coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s, is the process of becoming a mother. It’s a transition period, like adolescence, that involves radical physical and mental changes and has lasting effects. And as Lucy Jones reports, up to 45% of women describe childbirth as traumatic. That’s not a niche experience; it’s an epidemic. If it was men going through this, you can bet it would be at the top of international research agendas.
These three memoirs (and a bonus novel) are bold, often harrowing accounts of the metamorphosis involved in motherhood. They’re personal yet political in how they expose the lack of social support for creating and raising the next generation. All four of these 2023 releases are eye-opening, lyrical and vital; they deserve to be better known.
Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones
Like Jones’s previous book, Losing Eden, about climate breakdown and the human need for nature, Matrescence is a potent blend of scientific research and stories from the frontline. She has synthesized a huge amount of information into a tight 260-some pages that are structured thematically but also proceed roughly chronologically through her own matrescence. Not long into her pregnancy with her first child, a daughter, she realised the extent to which outdated and sexist expectations still govern motherhood: concepts like “natural childbirth” and “maternal instinct,” the judgemental requirement for exclusive breastfeeding, the idea that a parent should “enjoy every minute” of their offspring’s babyhood rather than admitting depression or overwhelm. After the cataclysm of birth, loneliness set in. “Matrescence was another country, another planet. I didn’t know how to talk about the existential crisis I was facing, or the confronting, encompassing relationship I was now in.”
Jones is now a mother of three. You might think delivery would get easier each time, but in fact the birth of her second son was worst, physically: she had to go into immediate surgery for a fourth-degree anal sphincter tear. In reflecting on her own experiences, and speaking with experts, she has become passionate about fostering open discussion about the pain and risk of childbirth, and how to mitigate them. Women who aren’t informed about what they might go through suffer more because of the shock and isolation. There’s the medical side, but also the equally important social implications: new mothers need so much more practical and mental health support, and their unpaid care work must be properly valued by society. “Yet the focus remains on individual responsibility, maintaining the illusion that we are impermeable, impenetrable machines, disconnected from the world around us.”
The hybrid nature of the book is its genius. A purely scientific approach might have been dry; a social history well-trod and worthy; a memoir too inward-looking to make wider points. Instead it’s equally committed to all three purposes. I appreciated the laser focus on her own physical and emotional development, but the statistical and theoretical context gives a sense of the universal. The literary touches – lists and word clouds, verse-like meditations and flash vignettes about natural phenomena – are not always successful, but there is a thrill to seeing Jones experimenting. Like Leah Hazard’s Womb, this is by no means a book that’s just for mothers; it’s for anyone who’s ever had a mother.
With thanks to Allen Lane (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Milk: On Motherhood and Madness by Alice Kinsella
Kinsella is an Irish poet who became a mother in her mid-twenties; that’s young these days. In unchronological vignettes dated in relation to her son’s birth – the number of months after; negative numbers to indicate that it happened before – she explores her personality, mental health and bodily experiences, but also comments more widely on Irish culture (the stereotype of the ‘mammy’; the only recent closure of Magdalene laundries and overturning of anti-abortion laws) and theories about motherhood.
I liked this most when the author stuck close to her own sensory and emotional life; overall, the book felt too long and I thought a late segue into an argument against the dairy industry was unnecessary. Had I been the editor, I would have cut the titled essays and just stuck to the time-stamped pieces. At its best, though, this is a poetic engagement with the tropes and reality of motherhood, sometimes delivered in paragraphs that more closely resemble verse:
+1 I have become the common myth. Mother. The sleepy hum of early memories. The smell of shampoo, of Olay, of lavender. The feeling of safety. The absence of fear.
+2 There’s a possibility,
that we are among the happiest
people in the world:
mothers.[Record freeze preserve.] Fighting death by reproducing our days. Fighting death by reproducing. Here: your life on paper. Here: their life to come.
We’re expected to be mothers the instant we lock eyes with our baby. To shed everything we were and be reborn: Madonnas.
The baby’s favourite thing to do is sit on my lap and interact with other people. This is what mothers are for, I think. Comfort, security, a place to get to know the world from.
The language is gorgeous, and while Kinsella complains of disorientation to the point of worrying about losing herself (although she had struggled with mental health earlier in life, the subtitle’s reference to ‘madness’ seemed to me like overkill compared to other memoirs I’ve read of postpartum depression, trauma or psychosis, such as Inferno by Catherine Cho and Birth Notes by Jessica Cornwell), she comes across as entirely lucid. Her goal here is to find and add to the missing literature of motherhood, in much the same way that Jazmina Barrera, another young mother and writer, attempted with Linea Nigra. This would also make a good companion read to A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.
Kinsella is among my predictions for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist, along with Eliza Clark (Penance) and Tom Crewe (The New Life). (Public library)
The Unfamiliar: A Queer Motherhood Memoir by Kirsty Logan
I’ve read one of Kirsty Logan’s novels and dipped into her short stories. I immediately knew her parenting memoir would be up my street, but wondered how her fantasy/horror style might translate into nonfiction. Second-person narration is perfect for describing her journey into motherhood: a way of capturing the bewildering weirdness of this time but also forcing the reader to experience it firsthand. It is, in a way, as feminist and surreal as her other work. “You and your partner want a baby. But your two bodies can’t make a baby together. So you need some sperm.” That opening paragraph is a jolt, and the frank present-tense storytelling carries all through.
To start with, Logan’s wife Annie tried getting pregnant. They had a known sperm donor and did home insemination, then advanced to IVF. But after three miscarriages and a failed cycle, they took a doctor’s advice and switched to the younger womb – Logan’s, by four years. As “The Planning” makes way for “The Growing,” it helps that Annie knows exactly what she’s going through. The pregnancy sticks, though the fear of something going wrong never abates, and after the alternating magic and discomfort of those nine months (“You’ve reached the ‘shoplifting a honeydew’ stage”) it’s time for “The Birth,” as horrific an account as I’ve read. The baby had shifted to be back-to-back, which required an emergency C-section, but before that there was a sense of total helplessness, abandonment to unmanaged pain.
Finally the doctor comes. She asks what you would like, and you, shaking shitting pissing bleeding, unable to see when the pain reaches its peak, not screaming, not swearing, not being rude to anyone, not begging for an epidural, … say: I’d like to try some gas and air, if that’s okay, please.
What is remarkable is how Logan recreates this time so intensely – she took notes all through the pregnancy, plus on her phone in hospital and in the early days after bringing the baby home – but can also see how, even in the first hours, she was shaping it into a narrative. “You like that it’s a story. You like that it’s Gothic and gory … and funny.” Except it wasn’t. “You thought you were going to die.” And yet. “How can the lucid, everyday world explain this? The wonder, the curiosity, the recognition. The baby has lived inside your body, and you’ve only just met. The baby is your familiar, and deeply unfamiliar.”
This reminded me of other memoirs I’ve read about queer family-making, especially small by Claire Lynch, which similarly turns on the decision about which female partner will carry the pregnancy and is written in an experimental style. The Unfamiliar is utterly absorbing and conveys so much about the author and her family, even weaving in her father’s death seven years before. I’ve signed up for Logan’s online memoir-writing course (“Where to Start and Where to End”) organised by Writers & Artists (part of Bloomsbury) for next month.
With thanks to Virago Press for the free copy for review.
And, as a bonus, a short novel that deals with many of these same themes:
Reproduction by Louisa Hall
Procreation. Duplication. Imitation. All three connotations are appropriate for the title of an allusive novel about motherhood and doppelgangers. A pregnant writer starts composing a novel about Mary Shelley and finds the borders between fiction and (auto)biography blurring: “parts of her story detached themselves from the page and clung to my life.” The first long chapter, “Conception,” is full of biographical information about Shelley and the writing and plot of Frankenstein, chiming with Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout, which I read last year. It’s a recognisable piece of autofiction, moving with Hall from Texas to New York to Montana to Iowa as she marries, takes on various university teaching roles and goes through two miscarriages and then, in the “Birth” section, the traumatic birth of her daughter, after which she required surgery and blood transfusions.
These first two sections are exceptional. There’s a sublime clarity to them, like life has been transcribed to the page exactly as it was lived. The change of gears to the third section, “Science Fiction,” put me off, and it took me a long time to get back into the flow. In this final part, the narrator reconnects with a friend and colleague, Anna, who is determined to get pregnant on her own and genetically engineer her embryos to minimise all risk. Here she is more like a Rachel Cusk protagonist, eclipsed by another’s story and serving primarily as a recorder. I found this tedious. It all takes place during Trump’s presidency [Laura F. told me I accidentally published with that saying pregnancy – my brain was definitely saturated with the topic after these reads!] and the Covid pandemic, heightening the strangeness of matrescence and of the lengths Anna goes to. “What, after all, in these end times we lived in, was still really ‘natural’ at all?” the narrator ponders. She casts herself as the narrating Walton, and Anna as Dr. Frankenstein (or sometimes his monster), in this tale of transformation – chosen or not – and peril in a country hurtling toward self-implosion. It’s brilliantly envisioned, and – almost – flawlessly executed. (Public library)
Additional related reading:
Notes Made while Falling by Jenn Ashworth
After the Storm by Emma Jane Unsworth
And coming out in 2025: Mother, Animal by Helen Jukes (Elliott & Thompson)
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 