In Praise of the Bleak, the Foreboding, the Claustrophobic Depictions of Motherhood
Thoughts on the critical reception of motherhood memoirs
People expect a lot from mothers and even more from those who write about their experience of being one. After the publication of Rachel Cusk’s memoir of new motherhood, A Life’s Work, one reviewer wrote, “If everyone were to read this book, the propagation of the human race would virtually cease, which would be a shame.” Another called the book “at times bleak and foreboding” and not a “cheerful baby shower gift.” Implicit in both critiques is the idea that writing about motherhood should market motherhood to women – that the “motherhood memoir” should only appear in public as a kind of propaganda tool designed to pull women on the fence about having babies over to what is apparently not supposed to be framed as the dark side.
The blind spots here may be a bit a sign of the times. Cusk’s book came out in 2001 and reviews of Cusk’s writing have since taken on a kind of cult status for the way they openly illustrate the narrow male literary gaze. But while readers of Cusk’s work today may have a clearer understanding of how being a woman and a mother can shape the critical reception of one’s book, critics still often seem to forget.
2018 was a busy year for what Lynn Steger Strong called the trend of the “mom book.” That wave of mom books often got lumped together critically as, well, mom books, even though those books spanned style and form. The problem, Sarah Blackwood wrote that year for LARB, is that “when motherhood is figured as a subject that transcends genre or mode of expression, the discussion takes on a particular tone of assessment that can’t help but feel weirdly personally evaluative: how relatable was the treatment of the subject?”
The frequently feminized confessional tradition, of which the memoir is part, is held to similarly impossible standards. In a well-known review of Gina Frangello’s 2021 Blow Your House Down, one critic attacked Frangello’s writing citing “the literary trouble with rage.” The reviewer claimed that Frangello didn’t seem to understand the “difference between blurting out a series of personal truths and shaping a narrative, powered by observed rage and disciplined thought, that just might touch the universal thread.” The review doesn’t explore in-depth gendered expectations regarding anger, how the hand of power “disciplines” thought, or the many “shapes” a narrative might take but instead closes on this definition of memoir as a practice of hunting for “universal” truth.
This concept of universality is quite different from collective truth, something closer to what Lauren Berlant called an “intimate public,” created by a set of cultural objects that speak to a certain identity category or community, estimating a sense of belonging. But universality is nevertheless often evoked as a mark of a book’s or artwork’s moral goodness (and Art-ness). And in critiques of motherhood memoirs, the assumption that the mother-writer just couldn’t possibly have enough time to achieve such an ideal, on a craft level, often bubbles under the surface.
One critic, for example, supposed that Cusk “might not have had as much time or energy to write as she’d have liked” because she was a mother. This charge – that motherhood memoirs are sloppy or ill-conceived because of mommy brain or a lack of time – is a common one. A mother-writer is always too mother or too writer. She could never feasibly execute both forms of work at the time. In a review of Louise Erdrich’s memoir of early motherhood, The Blue Jay’s Dance, one critic remarked that the book was “occasionally too self-conscious about the importance of Erdrich's role as Writer, but the bond between mother and infant has rarely been captured so well.” So, women can’t have it all. Erdrich is mere mother. Her “rare” ability to capture the bond between mother and infant is apparently not enough to confer on her the self-important title Writer, because what’s a rare depiction of the bond between mother and infant if not something niche and trivial? Certainly that kind of skill is not worthy of the name Writing!
A more generous and thoughtful review of Cusk’s work admonished her for not applying the narrative tools she had at her disposal to flesh out the husband and baby characters in her book more fully. “The lack of detail contributes to the book’s claustrophobia,” that reviewer wrote. Rounding out the father and child in Cusk’s book, that critic wrote, would have highlighted “the political issues” of childcare. It’s an earnest gesture on behalf of the critic to consider what makes a motherhood memoir if not political then at least politically aware.
But isn’t the mental and psychological assault of motherhood also a political issue? The bleak, foreboding, claustrophobic isolation of motherhood that Cusk captures so well in her writing is exactly what led me to devour the book the first time I read it. Those qualities are also what have led me to return to the book many times since to study it on the level of craft. It seems to me she wrote exactly the book she set out to write.
A 2019 review review of several books written by women used phrases like “a glorified journal” and “too navel-gazing to inspire the reader.” (The three books reviewed were not motherhood memoirs, though one could fall under that rubric and another is a story of immigration and sexual violation.) A critique of the writing on the sentence level is followed by several beautifully wrought poetic sentences pulled from the book in question. That section of the review, though, abruptly ends after the citation, as though the reviewer has dropped some objective truth simply by providing a quotation. The review ends with the conclusion that memoir should be “instructive” rather than filled with “sleepy musings.”
The claim toward universality takes on a new tenor here. Memoir should not only reflect the experiences of all humanity, but also wake us up and tell us how to live, like a self-help book, rather than show us what living looks like – rather than, say, allowing us to witness an artist turning over their subject matter.
As author Sarah McColl wrote in response to that 2019 critique of navel gazing, “When authors write mediocre novels, it doesn't send critics questioning the very legitimacy of the genre.” But memoirists seem always to be put in the position of defending their genre.
I’ve been reading Melissa Febos’ incredible new craft book Body Work in preparation for an interview I’m doing with her for Electric Lit. In the essay “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” Febos writes that resistance to memoir is always in part a resistance to social justice movements. She also writes, “I don’t think it’s a stretch to wonder if the navel, as the locus of all this disdain, has something to do with its connection to birth, and the body, and the female.”
This questioning of the genre’s legitimacy is often couched in a misogynistic policing of women’s writing. Mother-writers who dare appear as unlikable “bad mom” characters in their own books, not surprisingly, receive a special dose of animosity and scrutiny from both critics and the reading public for their disturbing self-indulgence. In an interview/review of Jowita Bydlowska’s 2013 Drunk Mom in Globe and Mail, the critic writes that she’s interested in what Bydlowska’s book reveals about “what is private, what should perhaps be kept private, what we need to know, what we don’t, what is insightful or just exhibitionism.”
The critic never gives any indication of where all these boundaries are located or who makes decisions about them. Nor does she explore how these boundaries are drawn differently for writers who are women or mothers or from other historically targeted groups. She does, however, offer a palpable attitude of disgust toward Bydlowska’s choice to share her story of struggling with addiction while mothering. The rest of the piece is a dressing-down of Bydlowska’s decision to write about this awful period of her life and of her physical appearance at the interview. The thesis here is that if your experience of motherhood looks this messy, it would be better to just shut up about it.
Strangely, that critic spends a good part of the review recounting how she pressed Bydlowska for details about her relationship with her husband, also a writer. The critic gets all huffy when Bydlowska draws her own clear boundaries against centering the interview on what she perceives to be marital gossip, rather than on the book she has written. Here we circle back to that common trope in the critical reception of writing by women—what about how all this will affect the men? If it’s not why didn’t you write more about him, then it’s why did you hurt his feelings by writing about him at all.
That review closes with a question lobbed at Bydlowska: “Why does she feel compelled to write such excruciatingly personal stories?” And so the tradition of adjudicating the memoirist’s life decisions and situating such an adjudication in some vague outline of what memoir should and, perhaps more importantly, should not do, appears once more. This is the kind of thing that just doesn’t happen to male writers.
Last week, I finished some major revisions of my own memoir and began thinking more about how the book might move into the world, so perhaps it’s my own feminine narcissism that led me to this subject. But I do believe every critic should consider what power structures they are replicating in their writing, just as every writer of fiction or nonfiction or poetry should.
I haven’t cited any critics mentioned above by name because calling them out is very much not my point here. I am less interested in pointing fingers than in noticing patterns. I started researching this piece looking for overt displays of misogyny, expecting to find a bunch of reviews written by arrogant men. There is plenty of that to be found. Walk on over to Goodreads for a full display of misogynistic comments on what mothers should and shouldn’t write about and what mothers should and shouldn’t look like.
But it was the subtle misogyny that really grabbed me. Kate Manne writes in her book Down Girl that misogyny is a reponse to women who threaten given power structures. It targets women who are “insubordinate, negligent, or out of order” and its primary manifestations are “in punishing bad women’s behavior.”
Part of the problem with criticism of motherhood memoirs is also the inability (or unwillingness) of critics to distinguish between things like trauma, addiction, free will, coercion, power, gender, marriage, caregiving, maternal labor, domestic labor, the culturally and economically specific working conditions of parenthood, and that amorphous and ever-tangled string of affects we call “love.” When all the turmoil that is “motherhood” is thrown full tilt at the reader, it can feel a lot like motherhood feels—hard to process, hard to see. One critical reflex is to make sense of that response, to validate it by reprimanding an author, to look away.
This inability to parse the complex and contradictory terrain of motherhood, however, doesn’t just afflict book critics. It’s a much larger cultural failing. In mainstream discourse, most people lump a lot under the umbrella subject “motherhood,” failing to parse the threads of work and identity referenced by such a term. In general, we collectively lack a nuanced discourse around the affective, psychological, and physical reality of maternal and domestic work (although many thinkers and writers have, during the pandemic, begun to change this).
In her follow-up piece to all those reviews of A Life’s Work, Cusk noted that one critic accused her of sequestering her child in the kitchen. But being inescapably sequestered in the home is the very state of being a mother in much of modern capitalist society! To depict this quality of motherhood, confining her reader there, was one of Cusk’s most radical formal gestures—an invitation to readers to experience the utter isolation and forced intimacy of a culturally specific form of domestic life.
Some might say it’s the memoirist’s job to make such complex distinctions clear. I don’t completely disagree. But drawing out every detail of the mythology of motherhood, the policy failures that shape the current experience of parenting, and the history of one’s body isn’t possible for one author or one book. As I tell my students, we must read the thing on its own terms. And even memoir rooted in cultural analysis must pick a lane, even if it’s a few lanes braided together, before one risks speaking for others.
Yearning toward universality, in other words, is not only a tall order but a privileged one, and it is usually code for why didn’t you write a little more nicely about your husband and child. Striving for universality in memoir also undoes the radical potential of autobiographical writing, a practice of testimony – a potential to provide an expansive and ever-diversifying archive of the human experience.
The more important point, perhaps, is not what memoir should do or be, but the question of the memoirist’s larger artistic role. Yes, at its best, memoir reaches beyond the self. But to do so, I believe the writing must be squarely and deeply rooted in the self. If memoir is to be conceived of something other than a real-life hero’s journey (a masculine form that really doesn’t reflect the feeling of living in a body, especially a woman’s body, or a mother’s body, where very little is ever overcome), the memoirist’s role, I think, must be to testify to the experience of having a body – a body that collects, until death, so much junk from the world, junk that creates deep grooves in the skin. Delimiting what of that junk should or should not appear in autobiographical writing, what kinds of experiences should or should not be represented, what kind of testimony is allowed in the public sphere, is only a veiled patrolling of what bodies are allowed to enter the public sphere and take up space there.
Cusk recognized that each body is shaped differently by its movement through the world. Reflecting on how she was “pitched by motherhood into the recollection of childhood unhappiness and confusion,” Cusk wrote that, “these things do not lie entirely within our own control.” But for her, documenting that lack of control was ultimately a freeing experience: “My great love for my children and step-child slowly liberated me from much of what I felt about the past. I freed myself – or them – by trying to be honest, by being willing to apologise.” For many of her readers of her work, the effect was similar.
There is some great criticism on books about motherhood. It can be done! In 2018, during that swell of mom books, many important essays were critical in a way that sought to expand the genre of memoir, rather than contract and discipline it, including many that pointed out how many of those books were written by white women. As Angela Garbes wrote in one of those essays, “Books on motherhood by people of color certainly exist, but they are few and far between. Publishers simply don’t buy as many books by mothers of color, and it’s likely that many writers don’t pursue writing about their journeys with pregnancy and motherhood because they don’t believe they’ll be given a chance.”
What we really need are more books about care work in all its forms, more testimony by bodies and identities of all sorts, bodies who care for other bodies in all different ways (along with lots of structural change to support such bodies in their work). “The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room,” Febos writes.