Reading about Mothers and Motherhood: Cosslett, Cusk, Emma Press Poetry, Heti, and Pachico
It was (North American) Mother’s Day at the weekend, an occasion I have complicated feelings about now that my mother is gone. But I don’t think I’ll ever stop reading and writing about mothering. At first I planned to divide my recent topical reads (one a reread) into two sets, one for ambivalence about becoming a mother and the other for mixed feelings about one’s mother. But the two are intertwined – especially in the poetry anthology I consider below – such that they feel more like facets of the same experience. I also review two memoirs (one classic; one not so much) and two novels (autofiction vs. science fiction).
The Year of the Cat: A Love Story by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (2023)
This was on my Most Anticipated list last year. A Covid memoir that features adopting a cat and agonizing over the question of whether to have a baby sounded right up my street. And in the earlier pages, in which Cosslett brings Mackerel the kitten home during the first lockdown and interrogates the stereotype of the crazy cat lady from the days of witches’ familiars onwards, it indeed seemed to be so. But the further I got, the more my pace through the book slowed to a limp; it took me 10 months to read, in fits and starts.
I’ve struggled to pinpoint what I found so off-putting, but I have a few hypotheses: 1) By the time I got hold of this, I’d tired of Covid narratives. 2) Fragmentary narratives can seem like profound reflections on subjectivity and silences. But Cosslett’s strategy of bouncing between different topics – worry over her developmentally disabled brother, time working as an au pair in France, PTSD from an attempted strangling by a stranger in London and being in Paris on the day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack – with every page or even every paragraph, feels more like laziness or arrogance. Of course the links are there; can’t you see them?
3) Cosslett claims to reject clichéd notions about pets being substitutes for children, then goes right along with them by presenting Mackerel as an object of mothering (“there is something about looking after her that has prodded the carer in me awake”) and setting up a parallel between her decision to adopt the kitten and her decision to have a child. “Though I had all these very valid reasons not to get a cat, I still wanted one,” she writes early on. And towards the end, even after she’s considered all the ‘very valid reasons’ not to have a baby, she does anyway. “I need to find another way of framing it, if I am to do it,” she says. So she decides that it’s an expression of bravery, proof of overcoming trauma. I was unconvinced. When people accuse memoirists of being navel-gazing, this is just the sort of book they have in mind. I wonder if those familiar with her Guardian journalism would agree. (Public library)
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk (2001)
When this was first published, Cusk was vilified for “hating” her child – that is, for writing honestly about the bewilderment and misery of early motherhood. We’ve moved on since then. Now women are allowed to admit that it’s not all cherubs and lullabies. I suspect what people objected to was the unemotional tone: Cusk writes like an anthropologist arriving in a new land. The style is similar to her novels’ in that she can seem detached because of her dry wit, elevated diction and frequent literary allusions.
I understand that crying, being the baby’s only means of communication, has any number of causes, which it falls to me, as her chief companion and link to the world, to interpret.
Have you taken her to toddler group, the health visitor enquired. I had not. Like vaccinations and mother and baby clinics, the notion instilled in me a deep administrative terror.
We [new parents] are heroic and cruel, authoritative and then servile, cleaving to our guesses and inspirations and bizarre rituals in the absence of any real understanding of what we are doing or how it should properly be done.
She approaches mumsy things as an outsider, clinging to intellectualism even though it doesn’t seem to apply to this new world of bodily obligation, “the rambling dream of feeding and crying that my life has become.” By the end of the book, she does express love for and attachment to her daughter, built up over time and through constant presence. But she doesn’t downplay how difficult it was. “For the first year of her life work and love were bound together, fiercely, painfully.” This is a classic of motherhood literature, and more engaging than anything else I’ve read by Cusk. (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com)
The Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood, ed. by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright (2014)
There’s a great variety of subject matter and tone here, despite the apparently narrow theme. There are poems about pregnancy (“I have a comfort house inside my body” by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi), childbirth (“The Tempest” by Melinda Kallismae) and new motherhood, but also pieces imagining the babies that never were (“Daughters” by Catherine Smith) or revealing the complicated feelings adults have towards their mothers.
“All My Mad Mothers” by Jacqueline Saphra depicts a difficult bond through absurdist metaphors: “My mother was so hard to grasp: once we found her in a bath / of olive oil, or was it sesame, her skin well-slicked / … / to ease her way into this world. Or out of it.” I also loved her evocation of a mother–daughter relationship through a rundown of a cabinet’s contents in “My Mother’s Bathroom Armoury.”
In “My Mother Moves into Adolescence,” Deborah Alma expresses exasperation at the constant queries and calls for help from someone unconfident in English. “This, then, is how you should pray” by Flora de Falbe cleverly reuses the structure of the Lord’s Prayer as she sees her mother returning to independent life and a career as her daughter prepares to leave home. “I will hold you / as you held me / my mother – / yours are the bathroom catalogues / and the whole of a glorious future.”
I connected with these perhaps more so than the poems about becoming a mother, but there are lots of strong entries and very few unmemorable ones. Even within the mothers’ testimonials, there is ambivalence: the visceral vocabulary in “Collage” by Anna Kisby is rather morbid, partway to gruesome: “You look at me // like liver looks at me, like heart. You are familiar as innards. / In strip-light I clean your first shit. I’m not sure I do it right. / It sticks to me like funeral silk. … There is a window // guillotined into the wall. I scoop you up like a clod.”
A favourite pair: “Talisman” by Anna Kirk and “Grasshopper Warbler” by Liz Berry, on facing pages, for their nature imagery. “Child, you are grape / skins stretched over fishbones. … You are crab claws unfurling into cabbage leaves,” Kirk writes. Berry likens pregnancy to patient waiting for an elusive bird by a reedbed. (Free copy – newsletter giveaway)
Motherhood by Sheila Heti (2018)
I first read this nearly six years ago (see my original review), when I was 34; I’m now 40 and pretty much decided against having children, but FOMO is a lingering niggle. Even though I already owned it in hardback, I couldn’t resist picking up a nearly new paperback I saw going for 50 pence in a charity shop, if only for the Leanne Shapton cover – her simple, elegant watercolour style is instantly recognizable. Having a different copy also provided some novelty for my reread, which is ongoing; I’m about 80 pages from the end.
I’m not finding Heti’s autofiction musings quite as profound this time around, and I can’t deny that the book is starting to feel repetitive, but I’ve still marked more than a dozen passages. Pondering whether to have children is only part of the enquiry into what a woman artist’s life should be. The intergenerational setup stands out to me again as Heti compares her Holocaust survivor grandmother’s short life with her mother’s practical career and her own creative one.
For the past month or so, I’ve also been reading Alphabetical Diaries, so you could say that I’m pretty Heti-ed out right now, but I do so admire her for writing exactly what she wants to and sticking to no one else’s template. People probably react against Heti’s work as self-indulgent in the same way I did with Cosslett’s, but the former’s shtick works for me. (Secondhand purchase – Bas Books & Home, Newbury)
A few of the passages that have most struck me on this second reading:
I think that is how childbearing feels to me: a once-necessary, now sentimental gesture.
I don’t want ‘not a mother’ to be part of who I am—for my identity to be the negative of someone else’s positive identity.
The whole world needs to be mothered. I don’t need to invent a brand new life to give the warming effect to my life I imagine mothering will bring.
I have to think, If I wanted a kid, I already would have had one by now—or at least I would have tried.
Jungle House by Julianne Pachico (2023)
{BEWARE SPOILERS}
Pachico’s third novel is closer to sci-fi than I might have expected. Apart from Lena, the protagonist, all the major characters are machines or digital recreations: AI, droids, a drone, or a holograph of the consciousness of a dead girl. “Mother” is the AI security system that controls Jungle House, the Morel family’s vacation home in a country that resembles Colombia, where Pachico grew up and set her first two books. Lena, as the human caretaker, is forever grateful to Mother for rescuing her as a baby after the violent death of her parents, who were presumed rebels.
Mother is exacting but mercurial, strict about cleanliness yet apt to forget or overlook things during one of her “spells.” Lena pushes the boundaries of her independence, believing that Mother only wants to protect her but still longing to explore the degraded wilderness beyond the compound.
Mother was right, because Mother was always right about these kinds of things. The world was a complicated place, and Mother understood it much better than she did.
In the house, there was no privacy. In the house, Mother saw all.
Mother was Lena’s world. And Lena, in turn, was hers. No matter how angry they got at each other, no matter how much they fought, no matter the things that Mother did or didn’t do … they had each other.
It takes a while to work out just how tech-reliant this scenario is, what the repeated references to “the pit bull” are about, and how Lena emulated and resented Isabella, the Morel daughter, in equal measure. Even creepier than the satellites’ plan to digitize humans is the fact that Isabella’s security drone, Anton, can fabricate recorded memories. This reminded me a lot of Klara and the Sun. Tech themes aren’t my favourite, but I ultimately thought of this as an allegory of life with a narcissistic mother and the child’s essential task of breaking free. It’s not clinical and contrived, though; it’s a taut, subtle thriller with an evocative setting. (Public library)
See also: “Three on a Theme: Matrescence Memoirs”
Does one or more of these books take your fancy?
Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, Writers’ Prize & Young Writer of the Year Award Catch-Up
This time of year, it’s hard to keep up with all of the literary prize announcements: longlists, shortlists, winners. I’m mostly focussing on the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction this year, but I like to dip a toe into the others where I can. I ask: What do I have time to read? What can I find at the library? and Which books are on multiple lists so I can tick off several at a go??
Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
(Shortlist to be announced on 27 March.)
Read so far: Intervals by Marianne Brooker, Matrescence by Lucy Jones
&
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud
Past: Sunday Times/Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist
Currently: Jhalak Prize longlist
I also expect this to be a strong contender for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, and hope it doesn’t end up being a multi-prize bridesmaid as it is an excellent book but an unusual one that is hard to pin down by genre. Most simply, it is a travel memoir taking in flat landscapes of the British Isles: the Cambridgeshire fens, Orford Ness in Suffolk, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor, and the Orkney Islands.
But flatness is a psychological motif as well as a physical reality here. Growing up in Pakistan with a violent Pakistani father and a passive Scottish mother, Masud chose the “freeze” option when in fight-or-flight situations. When she was 15, her father disowned her and she moved with her mother and sisters to Scotland. Though no particularly awful things happened, a childhood lack of safety, belonging and love left her with complex PTSD that still affects how she relates to her body and to other people, even after her father’s death.
Masud is clear-eyed about her self and gains a new understanding of what her mother went through during their trip to Orkney. The Newcastle chapter explores lockdown as a literal Covid-era circumstance but also as a state of mind – the enforced solitude and stillness suited her just fine. Her descriptions of landscapes and journeys are engaging and her metaphors are vibrant: “South Nuns Moor stretched wide, like mint in my throat”; “I couldn’t stop thinking about the Holm of Grimbister, floating like a communion wafer on the blue water.” Although she is an academic, her language is never off-puttingly scholarly. There is a political message here about the fundamental trauma of colonialism and its ongoing effects on people of colour. “I don’t want ever to be wholly relaxed, wholly at home, in a world of flowing fresh water built on the parched pain of others,” she writes.
What initially seems like a flat authorial affect softens through the book as Masud learns strategies for relating to her past. “All families are cults. All parents let their children down.” Geography, history and social justice are all a backdrop for a stirring personal story. Literally my only annoyance was the pseudonyms she gives to her sisters (Rabbit, Spot and Forget-Me-Not). (Read via Edelweiss)
And a quick skim:
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
Past: Writers’ Prize shortlist, nonfiction category
For years people have been confusing Naomi Klein (geography professor, climate commentator, author of No Logo, etc.) with Naomi Wolf (feminist author of The Beauty Myth, Vagina, etc.). This became problematic when “Other Naomi” espoused various right-wing conspiracy theories, culminating with allying herself with Steve Bannon in antivaxxer propaganda. Klein theorizes on Wolf’s ideological journey and motivations, weaving in information about the doppelganger in popular culture (e.g., Philip Roth’s novels) and her own concerns about personal branding. I’m not politically minded enough to stay engaged with this but what I did read I found interesting and shrewdly written. I do wonder how her publisher was confident this wouldn’t attract libel allegations? (Public library)
Predictions: Cumming (see below) and Klein are very likely to advance. I’m less drawn to the history or popular science/tech titles. I’d most like to read Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines by Patricia Evangelista, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder, and How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair. I’d be delighted for Brooker, Jones and Masud to be on the shortlist. Three or more by BIPOC would seem appropriate. I expect they’ll go for diversity of subject matter as well.
Writers’ Prize
Last year I read most books from the shortlists and so was able to make informed (and, amazingly, thoroughly correct) predictions of the winners. I didn’t do as well this year. In particular, I failed with the nonfiction list in that I DNFed Mark O’Connell’s book and twice borrowed the Cumming from the library but never managed to make myself start it; I thought her On Chapel Sands overrated. (I did skim the Klein, as above.) But at least I read the poetry shortlist in full:
Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant: I found more to sink my teeth into here than I did with his debut collection, Thinking with Trees (2021). Part I’s childhood memories of Jamaica open out into a wider world as the poet travels to London, Paris and Venice, working in snippets of French and Italian and engaging with art and literature. “I’m haunted as much by the character Othello as by the silences in the story.” Part III returns home for the death of his grandmother and a coming to terms with identity. [Winner: Forward Prize for Best Collection; Past: T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist] (Public library)
The Home Child by Liz Berry: A novel in verse “loosely inspired,” as Berry puts it, by her great-aunt Eliza Showell’s experience: she was a 12-year-old orphan when, in 1908, she was forcibly migrated from the English Midlands to Nova Scotia. The scenes follow her from her home to the Children’s Emigration Home in Birmingham, on the sea voyage, and in her new situation as a maid to an elderly invalid. Life is gruelling and lonely until a boy named Daniel also comes to the McPhail farm. This was a slow and not especially engaging read because of the use of dialect, which for me really got in the way of the story. (Public library)
& Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan (Current: Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist)
Three category winners:
- The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright (Fiction)
- Thunderclap by Laura Cumming (Nonfiction) (Current: Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction longlist)
- The Home Child by Liz Berry (Poetry)
Overall winner: The Home Child by Liz Berry
Observations: The academy values books that cross genres. It appreciates when authors try something new, or use language in interesting ways (e.g. dialect – there’s also some in the Allen-Paisant, but not as much as in the Berry). But my taste rarely aligns with theirs, such that I am unlikely to agree with its judgements. Based on my reading, I would have given the category awards to Murray, Klein and Chan and the overall award perhaps to Murray. (He recently won the inaugural Nero Book Awards’ Gold Prize instead.)
World Poetry Day stack last week
Young Writer of the Year Award
Shortlist:
- The New Life by Tom Crewe (Past: Nero Book Award shortlist, debut fiction)
- Close to Home by Michael Magee (Winner: Nero Book Award, debut fiction category)
- A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (see above)
&
Bad Diaspora Poems by Momtaza Mehri
Winner: Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Nostalgia is bidirectional. Vantage point makes all the difference. Africa becomes a repository of unceasing fantasies, the sublimation of our curdled angst.
Crossing between Somalia, Italy and London and proceeding from the 1830s to the present day, this debut collection sets family history amid wider global movements. It’s peopled with nomads, colonisers, immigrants and refugees. In stanzas and prose paragraphs, wordplay and truth-telling, Mehri captures the welter of emotions for those whose identity is split between countries and complicated by conflict and migration. I particularly admired “Wink Wink,” which is presented in two columns and opens with the suspension of time before the speaker knew their father was safe after a terrorist attack. There’s super-clever enjambment in this one: “this time it happened / after evening prayer // cascade of iced tea / & sugared straws // then a line / break // hot spray of bullets & / reverb & // in less than thirty minutes we / they the land // lose twenty of our children”. Confident and sophisticated, this is a first-rate debut.
A few more favourite lines:
IX. Art is something we do when the war ends.
X. Even when no one dies on the journey, something always does.
(from “A Few Facts We Hesitantly Know to Be Somewhat True”)
You think of how casually our bodies are overruled by kin,
by blood, by heartaches disguised as homelands.
How you can count the years you have lived for yourself on one hand.
History is the hammer. You are the nail.
(from “Reciprocity is a Two-way Street”)
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
I hadn’t been following the Award on Instagram so totally missed the news of them bringing back a shadow panel for the first time since 2020. The four young female Bookstagrammers chose Mehri’s collection as their winner – well deserved.
Winner: The New Life by Tom Crewe
This was no surprise given that it was the Sunday Times book of the year last year (and my book of the year, to be fair). I’ve had no interest in reading the Magee. It’s a shame that a young woman of colour did not win as this year would have been a good opportunity for it. (What happened last year, seriously?!) But in that this award is supposed to be tied into the zeitgeist and honour an author on their way up in the world – as with Sally Rooney in my shadowing year – I do think the judges got it right.
Some 2023 Reading Superlatives
Longest book read this year: The Weather Woman by Sally Gardner (457 pages) – not very impressive compared to last year’s 720-page To Paradise. That means I didn’t get through a single doorstopper this year. D’oh!
Shortest book read this year: Pitch Black by Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton (40 pages)
Authors I read the most by this year: Margaret Atwood, Deborah Levy and Brian Turner (3 books each); Amy Bloom, Simone de Beauvoir, Tove Jansson, John Lewis-Stempel, W. Somerset Maugham, L.M. Montgomery and Maggie O’Farrell (2 books each)
Publishers I read the most from: (Setting aside the ubiquitous Penguin and its many imprints) Carcanet (11 books) and Picador/Pan Macmillan (also 11), followed by Canongate (7).
My top author discoveries of the year: Michelle Huneven and Julie Marie Wade
My proudest bookish accomplishment: Helping to launch the Little Free Library in my neighbourhood in May, and curating it through the rest of the year (nearly daily tidying; occasional culling; requesting book donations)
Most pinching-myself bookish moments: Attending the Booker Prize ceremony; interviewing Lydia Davis and Anne Enright over e-mail; singing carols after-hours at Shakespeare and Company in Paris
Books that made me laugh: Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson, The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt, two by Katherine Heiny, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
Books that made me cry: A Heart that Works by Rob Delaney, Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout, Family Meal by Bryan Washington
The book that was the most fun to read: Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Best book club selections: By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah and The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Best last lines encountered this year: “And I stood there holding on to this man as though he were the very last person left on this sweet sad place that we call Earth.” (Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout)
A book that put a song in my head every time I picked it up: Here and Now by Henri Nouwen (Aqualung song here)
Shortest book title encountered: Lo (the poetry collection by Melissa Crowe), followed by Bear, Dirt, Milk and They
Best 2023 book titles: These Envoys of Beauty and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis
Best book titles from other years: I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, The Cats We Meet Along the Way, We All Want Impossible Things
Favourite title and cover combo of the year: I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore (shame the contents didn’t live up to it!)
Biggest disappointment: Speak to Me by Paula Cocozza
A 2023 book that everyone was reading but I decided not to: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
The worst books I read this year: Monica by Daniel Clowes, They by Kay Dick, Swallowing Geography by Deborah Levy and Self-Portrait in Green by Marie Ndiaye (1-star ratings are extremely rare for me; these were this year’s four)
The downright strangest book I read this year: Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
Christmas Reading and Book Haul
I recently read two novels set in the week of Christmas. Both were good reminders to appreciate the family that you have because whatever your dysfunctional situation, it could probably be much worse.
Christmas Holiday by W. Somerset Maugham (1939): Twenty-three-year-old Charley Mason heads to Paris on Christmas Eve to see his old friend Simon and live it up in the big city. First thing, Simon takes him to a brothel, where Charley dances with topless Russian prostitute “Princess Olga.” Before things go any further, he ducks out to attend a Mass he happened to get tickets for, and she begs to accompany him. When Lydia (for that is her real name) starts weeping during the service, he takes her back to his hotel and listens with rapt horror as she tells him the sordid story of how her husband, a petty criminal named Robert Berger, murdered a man for fun and ended up in prison overseas. From here on, Charley’s primary feeling for Lydia is pity and any desire he had is neutralized. Simon, too, is fascinated with the Berger case for what it reveals about essential human egoism. The chaste relationship with Lydia and the intensity of the interactions with Simon made me wonder if there was covert homoeroticism here. It was interesting, shortly after my Paris trip, to read something about how sleazy it is rather than how magical. (Secondhand purchase)
Flight by Lynn Steger Strong (2022): I couldn’t resist the setup: three grown-up siblings and their families meet at the one brother’s house in upstate New York to celebrate their first Christmas since their mother died. The novel takes place over just four days, the 22nd through Christmas Day, but Strong pumps in a lot of backstory about the sibling dynamic and the three marriages. The late Helen has already ascended into legend, and her coastal home in Florida is a bargaining chip. Tess, Martin’s lawyer wife, approaches the problem practically: sell it and split the profits three ways. Henry, an environmentalist artist, wants to sell the land to the state to be part of a nature preserve. Kate, the sentimental one, wants to live in the house herself but isn’t sure she and Josh can afford to buy her brothers out. At first I thought this was going to be a slightly irksome story of privileged white people and their ‘problems’, but there is a biracial character and an ex-heroin addict and her daughter also become key characters. As the family build igloos, bake pies and plan the perfect photo shoot, offences are simmering under the surface (“Mostly they resent each other from a comfortable enough distance that they might call it love”). These all fade, though, when a child goes missing. I was reminded subtly of Ann Patchett’s work, but more, with the environmental and parenting themes, of Ramona Ausubel and Megan Mayhew Bergman. I’d read more by Strong. (Public library)
And now for the promised Christmas book haul.
Here’s what I bought with store credit at 2nd & Charles while in the States for my sister’s graduation with her bachelor’s in nursing.
We got to do some fun family Christmassy things while I was there for 10 days, then I flew back to the UK into Christmas Eve and got to do actual Christmas with my in-laws. It’s been a whirlwind of a month!
I had this book post waiting for me when I got back.
And received these for Christmas!
Love Your Library, December 2023
Posting a week early so as not to bother you all on Christmas Day and make things easier for myself while I’m spending time in the States with family. My thanks, as always, go to Eleanor for her faithful participation in this monthly meme.
I spotted this “Happy Hour” library across from Saint Severin church in Paris.
Since last month:
READ
- Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood
- Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood (on audiobook!)
- Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
- The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- Stories for Christmas and the Festive Season (British Library anthology)
- Death Valley by Melissa Broder
- Thunderclap by Laura Cumming
- King by Jonathan Eig
- Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan
- Jungle House by Julianne Pachico
- Flight by Lynne Seger Strong
RETURNED UNREAD
- Water by John Boyne
- Barcode by Jordan Frith
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey
These were requested after me, or I missed my moment. I’ll try them again another time – for next year’s Novellas in November if not before.
What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?
Share a link to your own post in the comments. Feel free to use the above image. The hashtag is #LoveYourLibrary.