Mommy Lit ? Momoirs ?

Is motherhood, that most primeval of states, much maligned in today’s mommy lit? Methinks so, a Martian might be moved to venture, on reading the current crop.

With titles that run the gamut from ‘Misconceptions’ to ‘Oh Yeah Get a Life’, you don’t have to delve too deep to figure that all-effacing motherhood is not the formula for the new millennium. Motherhood maybe our biological bug bear, these books say, but the times they are a–changing and we no longer care to pretend its mere child’s play. Such books, and there are now a whole bunch, ranging from activist analysis to easy breezy ‘momoirs’, don’t shy away from displaying their diapers, poopy or otherwise. The most sensational of them all, Orange prize winning ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’, tells the story of Eva Khatchadourian , an otherwise fulfilled career woman who can’t bring herself to like her child. That he kills seven fellow students in a high school shooting before his sixteenth birthday, is one of the questions this powerful novel asks – was Kevin innately bad or did he get twisted ? Analysing the runaway success of her book, journalist author Lionel Shriver says in an interview to the Guardian ,”I think Kevin has attracted an audience because my narrator, Eva, allows herself to say all those things that mothers are not supposed to say. She experiences pregnancy as an invasion. When her newborn son is first set on her breast, she is not overwhelmed with unconditional love; to her own horror, she feels nothing. She imputes to her perpetually screaming infant a devious intention to divide and conquer her marriage. Eva finds caring for a toddler dull”.

The metaphors of dullness , imprisonment and indeed, lack of feeling are not new ones. Betty Friedman in her 1963 cult book ‘The Feminine Mystique’ famously exploded the happy housewife mother figure. The real life women in Friedman’s book, in ‘smiling empty passivity’ or in ‘morbid depression’ tell their stories , one young mother of three even describing herself ‘ready for a padded cell’ before half the day’s work was done. But it took Erma Bombeck in the 1980’s to cleverly convert this maternal angst into daily diary humour in her bestselling ‘Motherhood : The Second Oldest Profession in the World’. It’s here she asks -"If someone was to run an ad in the New York Times which read: WANTED: Household drudge, 140 hour week, no retirement, no sick leave, no room of own, no Sundays off. Must be good with animals, kids and hamburger. Must share bath, would 42 million women still apply?" Sounds like a snappy bit of humour , and yet there’s no missing the serious satire. It would be two decades however, before another woman writer, this one an economist , would address Bombeck ‘s question with real numbers . Anne Crittenden in her ‘The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued’, quantifies the loss of lifetime earnings of the average college educated American mother as a million dollars. In a revealing anecdote Crittenden talks about the genesis of her book , a few years after she left her job at the New York Times to be full time mother ,” I ran into someone at a party who said, "Didn’t you used to be Ann Crittenden?" That’s when I knew I had to write this book.”

Crittenden’s book joins other activist titles like ‘The Myth of Motherhood’ and ‘The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars : Who decides What makes a Good Mother’. But it’s the Bombeck tradition of mommy lit that currently rules commercial roost ( even though the phrase ‘mommy lit’ appeared later, in a sort of maternal elder sister extension to the ‘Bridget Jones Diary’ inspired ‘chick lit’.) The Divine Secrets of the Mama Sisterhood have never been more readable and the last decade has seen a proliferation of such titles. They crib and they complain – some stridently and others satirically, and yet to read them is to see that they’re also crying out for help.

Of these, the best known is undoubtedly Allison Pearson’s 2002 novel ’I don’t Know How She Does It’. It tells the story of Kate Reddy, working fund manager mother of two and the multiple juggling act that is her life. Frantically defacing perfect factory made meat pies to look as if they’re homemade Kate Reddy reflects , “I already understood the world of women was divided in two: there were the proper mothers, self sacrificing bakers of apple pies….and there were the other sort” . And as she spars , singly with the Corporation she says, “It’s possible to get sway with being late in the City. The key thing is to offer what my lawyer friend Debra calls a Man’s Excuse. Senior managers who would be frankly appalled by the story of a vomiting nocturnal baby or an AWOL nanny…are happy to accept anything to do with the internal combustion engine ’The car broke down/was broken into.’ ‘You should have seen the – fill in scene of mayhem-at the –fill in street’ Either of these will do very well.”

This appeared in The Sunday Times Bookmark on May 8th - mothers day