Finished reading: A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow 📚
This one took me a little while to get into but once I was in, I was all in. Super fun while also dealing with all the ways our stories can be garbage. Highly recommend.
🔖📚 Read Ladies of Leisure.
This one bummed me out. I think it sells Dept. of Speculation short.
🔖📚📝Read Is Parenthood the Enemy of Creative Work? by Kim Brooks (The Cut)
That’s one of the major things parenting is teaching me, the balance between letting go in writing and practicing craft, the balance between being ferocious with my imagination and rigorous in my practice. Shape and chaos. Learning to shape chaos.
🔖📚 Read The books that help define motherhood – for mums everywhere to read
Is it ever possible to reclaim yourself without endangering your child?
I don’t know. Because for me it’s been more about reconstructing myself rather than reclaiming myself.
📺 Want to watch:
- SMILF
- Catastrophe
- Motherland
- The Letdown
- Workin’ Moms
🍿 Want to watch: Tully.
🔖📚 Read Art or Babies.
you can make your art without being an art monster: You can do it as… an art mother.
🔖📚 Read Why are we only talking about ‘mom books’ by white women? by Angela Garbes (The Cut).
I love Angela Garbes’s writing. This is another old one.
🔖📚 Read The Stranger Guest: The Literature of Pregnancy and New Motherhood by Lily Gurton-Wachter (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Another old bookmark.
How will having a baby disrupt my sense of who I am, of my body, my understanding of life and death, my relation to the world and to my sense of independence, my experience of fear and hope and time, and the structure of my experience altogether? Dr. Spock is silent on these topics.
By the time a new mother has the time (or free hands) to write again, the most extreme experience is beginning to fade from her memory.
🔖📚 In a Raft of New Books, Motherhood From (Almost) Every Angle by Parul Sehgal (The New York Times).
Recent books on motherhood, however, frequently and sometimes unwittingly, illustrate a different phenomenon: how motherhood dissolves the border of the self but shores up, often violently, the walls between classes of women.