Mother Lode: Portraits of Modern Motherhood
#Scurf224: Four books to make you gasp at the horrors of motherhood
These past few months the theme of motherhood emerged strongly in many of my reading titles. Olga Ravn’s My Work (2023, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell); Kate Zambreno’s To Write As if Already Dead (2021); Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow (2022); Eva Balastar’s Boulder (2020) all found in different weeks and times, creating a smorgasbord for the senses. These works explore the complexities, horrors and myriad unsaid travesties of motherhood, musing, deflecting and eventually burying themselves into the real work that goes on behind nursing a child. As I ached, cried and worried my way through their pages, I thought it a salient idea to put my afterthoughts to page. Here they are and I hope you find some meaning in them.
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Olga Ravn’s My Work prods into the raw, disorienting landscape of early motherhood. In her writing, we see how motherhood in it’s earliest phases is a time and place where the self fragments and reassembles under the relentless pressure of new life. It is a collage of diary entries, poems, and fragmented prose, where Ravn meticulously charts the psychological and physical shifts of a woman grappling with the ecstatic terror and profound isolation of caring for her newborn.
“I bore a hell within me which nothing could extinguish. everything was blood and nothing was happiness. If a man tells you that you're worrying too much, ask him to do the worrying for you.”
— Olga Ravn’s My Work
Here, Ravn goes into the grotesque as much as she likes to stay in touch with the mundane, elevating them both. She revealing the fierce, often unseen labor of creation: both artistic and physical. At the hear of My Work sits the radical transformation that occurs when someone becomes a mother.
Eva Baltasar’s Boulder, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, is a sharp-edged, visceral exploration of freedom, intimacy, and the seismic shifts in the life of a lesbian couple brought by motherhood. Through the eyes of an unnamed narrator, nicknamed Boulder (possibly because of her solitary nature), the novella plunges into the complexities of this relationship going through a sea of change because of her partner’s desire for a child. More than a desire, it feels like an obstinate demand on her part, and Boulder has no other option but to comply. Baltasar’s prose is spare and potent which captures the narrator’s independence and struggle against the perceived erosion of self within the confines of domesticity. Boulder is a sensuous, ragged story where some parts made me want to reread them almost immediately.
“I tamp down the truth and say all right, let’s do it. I don’t tell her that what I want is to not be a mother.”
Eva Baltasar’s Boulder
While both these books dealt with motherhood’ thorny waters more head on, and in the immediate aftermath of the baby’s birth, Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow tackles it a couple of decades later. The protagonist and her mother are out for a vacation through Japan, reconnecting with one another and with their roots. Cold Enough is a quiet novella, a travelogue, and a meditative exploration of the physical and emotional spaces this mother and daughter travel. Australian writer Au writes in a pared down language, holding back large expositions and favoring the mundane over the outlandish. The resultant writing is precise, delicate and impactful. On the face of it it might feel that the mother and daughter are reconnecting, but Cold Enough goes into the place where we’d rather stay at the surface level in some of our relationships.
“The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, suffering, until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere. I had one vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them.”
— Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow
The unspoken feelings remain so, polite conversation is just that: polite conversation. The distance between the mother and daughter is unbridgeable and they both acknowledge it, even respect it. In most of our closest relationships we often maintain a semblance of respect and buy peace by leaving the most important questions unasked, and Au does exactly that over the span of this short novella.
This leaves a haunting impression of what is felt but never fully articulated, and the comfort a lot of us often feel in that. That being broken and incomplete is sometimes better to maintain mental health and keep the wheel of relationships churning smoothly, decade after decade. This is an emotion we don’t very often encounter in writing about relationships. There’s always an eagerness to mend affairs and patch things back up. But Au doesn’t want to do that. It’s broken and that’s also fine, she seems to say.
This where Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead comes in. It’s an intricate, intense work that defies easy categorization. Part critical study, part memoir, and part fragmented diary, it searches through Zambreno’s sustained engagement with the work of French writer Hervé Guibert, particularly his autofictional accounts of living with AIDS. As she grapples with Guibert's fearless portrayal of illness and dying, Zambreno intertwines his story with her own contemporary experiences of writing, friendship, motherhood, and the isolation induced anxieties of early pandemic.
“I have at most fifteen minutes to write this passage. This passage will not be good literature.”
Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead
Zooming in on her experience of being a mother to a newborn while trying to navigate her writing world, Zambreno writes with a throbbing, bruise like energy. While writing about nursing her baby, while struggling to find even 10 minutes to write capture the fervid horrors of being a body and a writer in a capitalist world. While pregnant for a second time, it’s almost as if Zambreno ceases to hold an existence as a body herself; everything orbits around her fetus. She, merely a vessel. This echoes the sentiment of being a writer. When writing, the writer lets go of the idea of having a body and is concerned and thought of by others too, just as a vessel for the words, books, work to come out of her.
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These titles made me think deeply and viscerally about motherhood. As abortion rights remain a thorny subject in various parts of the body, women’s labor during and after labor continues to be written off, these books show a bleak mirror to an even bleaker reality. Motherhood is a valorised subject, often seen as heroic, sacrificial and selfless; these books juxtapose these notions against the reality. Motherhood erases the self, has no valor but only complete and utter surrender, and is in no way rewarding.
Many movies have attempted to carve out even the faintest etchings of this suffering, but the literary details of these novels give them a broader sense of verisimilitude. But Chantal Akerman’s chilling Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles does it best. Akerman was a writer, director, actor whose life was in large way marked by her connection to her mother. She made immensely moving films about the fragile parent-child bond and its relation to national, sexual, and emotional identity. Jeanne Dielman, 23 is a “masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety”. In it, she makes the audience experience really in a bone deep, present way the daily domestic erosion women go through, the inherent schizophrenia of being a mother and other, and the unspoken violence that lurks just beneath the surface. (Jeanne Dielman is 3.5 hours long and is now streaming on Mubi.)
I grew up in a joint (see: fractured) family seeing the agency of women being erased over and over again, and they they had kids. These women were not writers, artists, some of them did not even hold day jobs. And yet they were relegated to the last, most dark corner of our consciousness as soon as their babies arrived. These books and Akerman’s movie keep me awake at night in a way.
They me think of those sisters-in-law, aunts, cousins and friends; their erosion, depletion and unasked for sacrifices. My own mother rejoined work when I was two months old, leaving me under the care of her step sister. In these existential works, I see how the body trumps literature, as I finish each one of them feeling calloused. It shouldn’t have to be this way. Motherhood shouldn’t have to be this jagged, thorny, and ugly an experience just for women alone.
Some great writing I read this past week:
The JCB Prize is gone. What now? Journalist and writer Jane Borges takes us through the workings of the now defunct JCB Literary Prize which was a big cornerstone for literary writing in India for its brief run. I interviewed poet and writer Jayant Kaikini for his collection No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories that won the prize in 2019. The award was singular in its existence not just because of the hefty prize money (INR 25 lakh) but also due to the fact that it was given to translations form the last 7-10 years. Read Jane’s reporting here.
Granta’ spring 2025 issue Dead Friends (171) is just a gorgeous collection of fiction, essays and poetry on the topic. Start with Joanna Biggs’ essay on female friendship, and go on to read Gary Indiana’s (possibly) last work. The issue is up for sale on their website and some pieces are available to read online for free at the moment. Granta 171: Dead Friends (Spring 2025).
Lucy Jakub’s essay Love’s Work for the New York Review of Books covers the life and work of Hayao Miyazaki, with a laser sharp focus on the labour-intensive techniques the filmmaker used all his life. Jakub is also working on a book on Miyazaki and I’m very keen to read how she expands on this essay in that.