Why You Should Be Reading More Motherhood Memoirs
Parenting with an unfair advantage
In the language of corporate strategy—stick with me, we're going somewhere—a "perch" refers to the unfair advantage in having access to information others don't.
Asymmetrical knowledge allows companies to see patterns, make predictions, and deliver products that seem almost prescient. An obvious example would be Meta Facebook. At the height of their powers, 2.9 billion users regularly logged into the platform, sharing what was "on their mind," and leaving a cookie crumb trail across the web. When Facebook saw its numbers decreasing, with links being shared less frequently on its public platform and more often in closed spaces—WhatsApp groups and Instagram DMs—they didn't panic. They had the data. They understood the shift toward privacy, giving them an early mover advantage on acquiring those companies whilst others hesitated.
When you start to look for these perches, you can find them everywhere. VCs see pitch decks across an entire sector. Recruiters screen thousands of candidates. Experienced therapists build them through decades of hearing similar patterns of struggle. One place I’ve consistently uncovered them, in decade of learning to be a better dad, has been from an unexpected corner of the bookstore: motherhood memoirs.
Last year I devoured Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which led me back to her 2001 memoir A Life's Work—a chronicle of early motherhood that broke from the sanitised “No Problems in Parenting-Land” narrative that dominated parenting literature at the time. She wrote about the disorientation of the early days, the unavoidable identity crisis, the crushing weight of responsibility—everything outside the Overton window of motherhood as it stood at the turn of the century. This was 5 years before Facebook launched the status update, before the first Tweet flew out, preceding the era where the depth and breadth of human thought was waiting for you, day and night, in your preferred digital stream. The backlash was so severe she was still telling mums “sorry-not-sorry” seven years later: “I didn't particularly want anyone to read it. It had been important for me to make a record, that was all, of emotional and physical states I was unlikely to experience again.”
Covering the pregnancy and early, blurry months, she touches on the absurdity of bottle feeding (“Covertly, I go to a shop and buy bottles, sterilising tablets, tins of powdered formula milk. At home I lay them out like someone preparing to assemble a bomb.”) and the shock in seeing the world of books, her true centre of gravity, shifted forever (”Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence, I read books that I have read before, books I have loved, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having all along contained everything I had gone away to learn.")
In one passage, Cusk shares the illicit joy in seeing her daughter nod off, allowing her a brief transgression into her old life:
Her eyelids begin to droop. The sight of them reminds me of the possibility that she might go to sleep and stay that way for two or three hours. She has done this before. The prospect is exciting, for it is when the baby sleeps that I liaise, as if it were a lover, with my former life. These liaisons, though always thrilling, are often frantic. I dash about the house unable to decide what to do: to read, to work, to telephone my friends. Sometimes these pleasures elude me and I end up gloomily cleaning the house, or standing in front of the mirror striving to recognise myself. Sometimes I miss the baby and lie beside her cot while she sleeps. Sometimes I manage to read, or work, or talk, and am enjoying it when she wakes up unexpectedly and cries; and then the pain of moving from one life to the other is acute.
It’s impossible to read this book without feeling moved. I thundered through it, aghast at the magic trick Cusk performed repeatedly before my very eyes: she somehow uses the same 26 letters as the rest of us—the buttons on her keyboard, same as mine—but a form of alchemy occurs as she conjures them together, akin to watching her pull a rabbit out of a hat, or saw a woman in half:
I miss my daughter's babyhood already. In her growing up I have watched the present become the past, have seen first hand how life acquires the savour of longing. The storm of emotion, of the new, that accompanied her arrival is over now. I find that I am living in the knowledge of what I have, so that I see happiness before it quite passes. It has taken me a year to achieve this feat, this skill that has eluded me over a lifetime. I understand that it means that I am standing still. Motherhood sometimes seems to me like a sort of relay race, a journey whose purpose is to pass on the baton of life, all work and heat and hurry one minute and mere panting spectatorship the next; a team enterprise in which stardom is endlessly reconfigured, transferred. I see my daughter hurrying away from me, hurtling towards her future, and in that sight I recognise my ending, my frontier, the boundary of my life.
The motherhood memoir is an oasis of truth, used to quench our understanding of what it means to be a parent. It's no surprise that when Mike Mills was writing C'Mon C'Mon, a tour de force that captured caregiving with rare authenticity, he turned to the genre. In a pivotal scene, Joaquin Phoenix's character reads directly from Jacqueline Rose's Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, her words shaping the emotional core of the film:
Motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge—or rather bury—the reality of our own conflicts of what it means to be fully human. It is the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task, unrealizable of course, of mothers to repair. What are we doing to mothers when we expect them to carry the burden of everything that is hardest to contemplate about our society and ourselves? Mothers cannot help but be in touch with the most difficult aspects of any fully lived life. Why on earth should it fall to them to paint things bright and innocent and safe?
Jessi Klein’s I’ll Show Myself Out, coming 21 years after Cusk, chronicled the early years of motherhood for the next generation. A series of essays on the cruel ironies and joyous moments, hitting the major milestones along the way. Klein formalises the familiar, this new parent feeling as we begin to wrestle with the secret lives our parents once lived:
No one wants to know that after your mother finally placed you in your crib, she walked out of the room and screamed into a blanket, or cried in the bathroom, or drank a bottle of wine, or all of the above. No one wants to know that as she rocked you and sang you the tenth lullaby of the night, she was fantasizing about putting you down, walking out the door, and never coming back. A mother’s heroic journey is not about how she leaves, but about how she stays.
Or the simultaneous joys and aches as they head off to nursery:
I am still getting used to the fact that he has an entire half day away from us, a day with other people, about which, even if he shares a lot of details, we can only ever get a tiny sense of what happened, a puddle’s worth of reflected sky. My heart still skips a beat when he uses the words “my friends.”
And the thrilling, warm feeling to know that you’re needed, wanted and loved by a tiny human:
There is something I feel when my boy holds my hand. It is simultaneously the most blissed out I feel as a mother, and the most terrified I feel as the regular human person that, somewhere inside, I still am. His trust, his full belief that I am the person to lead him somehow always creates an electric thrill; in his little grip I feel my old self and my new self spark, as if two wires touched.
Fatherhood can often feel like a lonely existence, as we walk on a path dramatically different from the ones our fathers did, trodden down hard by generations of men before them. This old world—when protect, provide and preside was all that dads were expected to do—is no more. Not only do these books offer insight into what our partners might be experiencing—exposing men to the previously invisible, unfiltered reality of mothering, worth the price of entry alone—but their higher power comes from illuminating the water we swim in together.
Whilst becoming a father won’t transform your body in the way becoming a mother does, it will transform your life indelibly. How far, and in which direction, depends on how you lean into it. These books show the cultural scripts and profound identity shifts that come with parenthood aren’t gendered at their core, even if society has framed them that way. They help show fatherhood through a new lens—one not shaped by generations of emotional distance, but instead by the raw, unfiltered experience of caring so much it hurts.
Two things to read this week
The newsletter boom has given us a direct line into some of the world’s most interesting minds. Artist and author Miranda July, whose All Fours was praised by the New York Times as "the first great menopausal novel,” has been worth a recent subscribe as she chronicles the impact of the book.
I loved All Fours. But it didn’t make sense in the essay above. It was less a book on motherhood, and more on the sexual, creative, and relational reunification of a woman who happened to be a mother. (And a forceful reminder that we still remain whole people—with desires, ambitions, and identities—after becoming parents.) This piece from July’s newsletter is a great example of the types of conversations the book has inspired, and its accompanying comment section contains what amounts to detailed blueprints on the inner workings of the married female psyche.
If you’re interested in going further down the rabbit hole, and hear things from the other side, Freddie deBoer’s “rebuttal” isn’t the worst place to start, even if it does come off a little “man clutches at pearls.” (Sample line: “[July is] convincing aging women that they should leave their long-term partners and spend the rest of their lives cycling through one lover after another, enjoying a pleasantly hedonistic existence unbound by the restrictions of conventional morality.”)
Good Dadvice
I mean it’s technically a “good mumvice” special this week, but that doesn’t work …
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Your writing is like an oasis. Now that my girls are 12, I tell them about the lack of sleep, the anxiety, the fears for the future, the loss of identity - alongside all these great memories on Google Photos. I sometimes feel I’m a stranger in my own life. The guy who looks wistfully on while others are doing solo holidays, reading in cafes, biking across continents, laughing with friends in a bar, hiking quiet trails. And yet I wouldnt be anywhere else.
Thank you for this. As an avid reader - including of what you call Mum memoirs, I often wonder what dads would make of them. So pleased you’re recommending these books as amazing pieces of writing and also amazing insight from a mother’s perspective - much of which might resonate with fathers. In this vein, I’d recommend Prophet Song, Soldier Sailor and Night Bitch too.