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Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. A Memoir by Alexa Wolf. A small, greenery-shrouded home in Los Angeles serves as backdrop to this stunning drama of a mother and daughter who grapple with their volatile relationship - and with life-threatening health crises in an adversarial system. Paperback , pages.
To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about My Mother's House , please sign up. Page two of Making Babies and Anne Enright is apologising to entire bunches of people. Oh Anne Enright — I so enjoy it when you are having a go, not decrying the long and variegated tradition of denigrating female writers who write outwards from the inside of their lives, not calling it out, but having fun with it. Once she is done doing mock apologies she goes on: Is this still part of the piss-take?
My Mother's House: A Memoir by Alexa Wolf
Enright manages to stay ideologically unaffiliated, a heretic. She is able to protect her ambivalence about being both a mother and a writer who writes about being a mother — protect it from getting co-opted into some unwanted alliance, or camp. And while her smug-yet-astonished may be a throwaway line it seems to me diagnostically precise.
Not every time but enough times for it to be noticeable. Perhaps it is an impediment to good thinking too. Probably now is a good moment to mention I am feeling some trepidation. Yet here I am to argue against the over-memoirisation of motherhood. I have decided to hang on to trepidation, not try to quash it. Trepidation might mean an argument with no agenda.
Or me refusing to cover up, even a little, my limitations.
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I want to write about motherhood memoirs from a place of love and unconcealed irritation. These are not, and should not be, mutually exclusive. The reviewer Judith Newman thinks Enright wrote a great book. The essential condition is absurdity. Samuel Beckett could have come up with a great book on babies.
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- Giulio Coniglio fa merenda (Piccole storie) (Italian Edition)!
- "I know it's selfish, mum, but I can't tell you it's ok to die. I can't imagine life without you";
- Apremiante deseo de manantial (Spanish Edition)!
For Newman too much motherhood writing is wide-eyed with profundity or sublime feelings awe, terror , and light on out-and-out absurdity. My first response after reading her first sentence? Rattling off, in my head, names: Le Guin, Quinn Eades etc. Since becoming a mother I had read a lot of terrible nonfiction writing about motherhood. This could have been nothing most writing is terrible writing, most pronouncements about how there is no good writing about X are a waste of time or it could have been something. I wanted — want — to be able to think about it. In I wrote a book that got classified as a motherhood memoir.
It also had history, politics, war, time, cities, post-totalitarian hunger for glamour, friendships on the verge of cataclysm, poets I regarded as heroes. Print numbers, stock, distribution channels, mummy-flavoured publicity crumbs … I was deflated by my book about everything being so categorically and swiftly reframed as a motherhood memoir but voicing this feeling to anyone besides family and friends seemed graceless.
Against Motherhood Memoirs
What did it matter how I was sold? It was either that or the ethnic thing. Enough time has passed that I can now tell you: I was hurt by the implied suggestion that all the other stuff in the book was a bit of colour. Not only books but personal essays, blogs, anthologies, all stamped with familiar traits: Part confession, part analysis. Plenty of smug-yet-astonished bubbling just under too. The unmistakable formula bothered me but so did what the formula was at the service of — the formal and intellectual domestication of motherhood.
This style of memoir seemed to have achieved cultural and marketplace dominance in the anglophone world while simultaneously, predictably, making culture and marketplace feel indistinguishable. No ripping into specific books or using them as examples of larger problems or trends. I am arguing against something that is both culturally ubiquitous and continuously de-legitimated.