When I was halfway through my first pregnancy, a well-meaning friend offered a solution to the fact our child would be sleeping in the room I had always worked in. “Just put a desk at the bottom of the stairs,” she said. I pointed out that there wasn’t a lot of room, that it would be a bit chaotic, writing in the middle of a passageway. “Oh, well, you won’t write when you have a baby anyway,” she replied. “You won’t need a desk.”
I thought of this when I read the instructions given to Victorian author Charlotte Perkins Gilman after she was referred to a doctor for what academics have since diagnosed as postpartum depression. “Live as domestic a life as possible… Have your child with you all the time… Have but two hours intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.” Gilman would write The Yellow Wallpaper in 1890, after her treatment; evidently, she didn’t follow doctor’s orders.
Many things have changed over the past century and a half, but some haven’t as much as you might think. As someone who sold a book four days before she gave birth, then wrote it through the otherworldly, trauma-licked throes of new motherhood, one of the greatest surprises I’ve encountered as a woman who has written about her motherhood in real time is how weird people still are about it.
Hark: How Women Listen is a book about the sounds that women’s lives are made of but nobody’s really thought to write about before, such as phantom crying (when your child is asleep, but you’re convinced you can hear them wailing). I didn’t set out to write a memoir about what happened to my brain and body in the midst of having a child, but once those changes happened I found I couldn’t not: This was the most mind-bendingly transformative, physically ruinous thing that I’d ever experienced. I spent the first few days of motherhood in my living room, watching women walk past my window with their children, thinking, you went through this too? Writing about it, somehow, was easier than voicing it aloud.
The past two decades have seen a kind of baby boom in memoirs, anthologies, and novels about motherhood, and it was these that I turned to when I was thinking about having a child. Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi, a potent little novel about ambivalent motherhood and generational trauma. Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. Matrescence by Lucy Jones arrived in time for my own, and I read it 10 weeks post-partum; it became a kind of Bible. I could have chosen Rachel Cusk’s warts-and-all memoir A Life’s Work, which paved the way for dozens of others that explore the anticipation and experience of motherhood, among them Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Anne Enright’s Making Babies, and The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. The adoption memoir Motherhood, So White by Nefertiti Austin was part of a subsequent wave of material that sought to rebalance the abundance of white, often middle-class women’s post-partum offerings.
