Claire Kilroy, author of Soldier Sailor, recommends four books that reflect the experience of the early years of motherhood.
I remember reading an interview with Lucy Caldwell in which she said that, as a writer, it was always her instinct to prepare herself for a life event, or for anything really, by reading up on it. So, when she was pregnant with her first child, she read widely around the topic. Then she gave birth. None of the books she had encountered had prepared her for what lay ahead. This chimed with me. There doesn’t seem all that much out there when it comes to fiction, possibly because mothers are too wrecked to write when their children are small, and possibly because, up until recently, literary fiction was a gentlemen’s club and minding an infant wasn’t a literary topic. It’s also possible that the books have been written but just weren’t publicised or even published. The early years of motherhood can be surprisingly lonely and it helps to see your experience reflected on the page. Here are a few books I’ve found:
Multitudes by Lucy Caldwell
Caldwell is a novelist and playwright but her first publication after becoming a mother was this debut short-story collection. She deploys the form like a dental instrument to get straight into those tight areas that the larger, slower apparatus of the novel would take longer to reach. In the title story, she captures the panicked flux of two parents whose newborn has fallen seriously ill and is hospitalised. ‘For the first time in my life,’ the narrator says, ‘fiction has failed me. I can’t imagine myself out of myself, or even imagine doing so.’ Instead, Caldwell writes fiction differently – stripped back, staccato, moulding the material of real life into clipped, gut-punching paragraphs. This is a dispatch from the front. This is what writing is for.
Night Waking by Sarah Moss
A family relocates to an island to enable the husband to pursue . . . oh, who even cares what he’s at, he’s so selfish. Some glorified hobby to do with birds? Bottom line: he’s gone all day, returning only when he’s hungry and wondering what’s for dinner. There is no shop on the island. The wife has to scrabble around with whatever she can find in the cupboard to try to provide healthy family meals. She single-handedly raises their two young children while trying to write her thesis, but her youngest, Moth, won’t let her sleep, waking her every night with the same demand: ‘Mummy, say a Gruffalo. Mummy, say a Gruffalo. Mummy, say a Gruffalo.’ It’s like being trapped in a recurrent nightmare, but she triumphs in the end.
Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Pity poor Toby Fleishman, the good doctor who has placed his vocation of saving lives above the vocation of all the other school dads: that of getting rich. His ex-wife, Rachel, has done a runner, leaving him holding the kids. Everything about Toby is PERFECTLY REASONABLE. He is a PERFECTLY REASONABLE man. It’s just Rachel. She’s spoilt – too selfish to continue juggling career and family. Thus we have a middle-aged white guy exploring his post-divorce options with other women; so far, so Great American Novel. But then, after Rachel Fleishman has been dealt a good sound judging, Brodesser-Akner flips the narrative to include the female perspective and Great American Novel becomes Brilliant American Novel.
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
This is the literal blah blah blah of daily domestic life if you’re a mother working from home. Ellman charts the minute-to-minute thoughts of a woman in her kitchen baking cakes as a side hustle to supplement the family income. Her mind wanders in a Joycean manner (and the book is styled to resemble Ulysses) over the nuts and bolts of her day, her life. She has low self-esteem and considers herself very lucky to be loved by her second husband; she frets about the logistics of the deliveries she must make; she voices her concerns about her children, climate change, gun control in the US; she meditates on how the death of her mother broke her; and she wonders how to deal with the weirdly passive-aggressive, survivalist-type man she feels obliged to be nice to even though he seriously gives her the creeps . . .
This reading list originally appeared on bookshop.org. Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor is out now in paperback.
An urgent, memorable, gut-wrenching novel about motherhood, creativity and identity which is sure to get people talking.