Motherhood

It has been a long time since I read a book that I actively disliked as much as this one. I found this book infuriating. It had a few nice moments and good insights, but overall I found it arrogant, repetitive, oversimplified, and honestly frustrating. This review is based on point form notes I made while reading, so it is not the most organized. I was so frustrated while reading it so I wanted to share my notes in case anyone resonates.

Throughout the book Heti (or the narrator based on her) is so arrogant, constantly acting like other people's choices to have children are against her. She says “I resent the spectacle of all this breeding, which I see as a turning away from the living,” As if having children is not the most living thing one can do.

She continuously portrays her partner as such an asshole (he is constantly discounting her feelings), and yet describes their relationship as this amazing thing, mostly because he is hot? It seems that there is a hidden layer - maybe she likes him because he discounts her feelings, since she is so mired in self-indulgence of her own feelings, maybe he is refreshing to her? But since this is not ever stated, it sort of seems like she thinks he is an asshole.

Her ideas of gender roles feel like they are out of the 1950s. She mentions I think one time the possibility that a woman can be an artist and have a child, and that is not actually a specific example of a real women, it is hypothetical. The only real women examples she gives are either woman with children that she describes throughout most of the book with intense condescension (towards the end she briefly seems to consider the possibility that all her friends with children are not just animalistic idiots), or by contrast her own mother, who entirely abdicated emotional and practical responsibility for her children in favour of her job. Like what the fuck? Have you literally never met a mother who had a job/a happy life that wasn't entirely child-centric? Maybe I'm crazy but I'm 10 years younger than she was when she started writing this book and I can easily think of several mothers I know personally who had fulfilling careers or were artists while their children were young (including my own mother), without neglecting their children. And even if you don't personally know anyone like that, have some imagination!? She talks constantly in this book about imagining possible futures for her life, and yet her imagination seems so limited (EITHER you have a child, stop writing and become essentially a milk-producing animal; OR you don't have children and are a Writer, a Romantic Heroic Figure, so Important).

To the point above, at the VERY END of the book she says “I realized that when I was a little girl I had made up a story: that a woman who works or cares deeply about her work can't also be a loving and attentive mother; that it was not possible to be both - that in order to explain my mother to myself, and to justify why she kept so much distance from me, it had to be because existentially one couldn't care about both one's work and one's child. So it wasn't my mother's fault. And it wasn't my fault either.” (p. 247). If this insight had been a little earlier in the book than the last 20 pages I probably wouldn't have hated the book so much!?!? Did she literally not have an editor??

Re: not having an editor, this book is SO REPETITIVE, and also does not do what it promises to do, at all. It is purportedly about her decision whether or not to become a mother, yet throughout the book she gives about a million reasons (rational, instinctive, emotional, etc) why she does not want to be one, and only a series of oversimplified ideas about why one might want to be one. And she repeats these same arguments on both sides over and over, sometimes in almost the exact same words. She seems to have a lot of friends with children and yet she makes almost no use of these people as resources to understand the thought processes of people who choose to have children.

The book also promises to be about, or to discuss “Motherhood.” Maybe this is pedantic but this book is not about her grappling with motherhood (except in the few moments she talks about her mother/grandmother, which are some of the best parts of the book). Instead, it is about her decision whether to get pregnant. She mentions adoption ONCE, on page 168, in an offhanded way, and barely touches on other ways in which people can have nurturing roles without making the choice to have a child.

After her earlier book Women in Clothes, I would have thought that Heti would have made more use of the insights of others to write this book. That would have added SO MUCH. Instead, she frequently mentions other people who have children but rarely does more than project her own opinions onto them. She does not seem to care AT ALL about these other women, not even making any effort to develop them as 3-dimensional figures in her book. For example the character of Libby is first introduced as having accidentally become pregnant and feeling miserable about it. Then at the end of the book she says of Libby “it feels as natural for her to enter motherhood as it feels for me to entertain doubts” - wouldn't it have added an interesting dimension to the central issue of the book if we got to see and hear how Libby went from one state of mind to the other, what she grappled with? But no...as with many interesting subjects, Heti touches on this and brushes past, in favour of more petulant whining about her own really-quite-minor doubts about whether she wants to have a child (spoiler: she doesn't want to. This is not really a spoiler, she says this from moment one and NOTHING CHANGES).

She also treats these friends and their decisions to have children with so much derision, suggesting they are just doing it “reflexively” (p. 239).

Ecofascist-adjacent ideas (with no interrogation): “Nothing harms the earth more than another person–and nothing harms a person more than being born” (p. 178). Previously she talks at some length about how having children is old-fashioned. I honestly hate this Western-centric, utilitarian, eco-fascist bullshit, which she expresses without even having the guts to mention the environment, just assuming everyone knows what she means by this sentiment and will agree with her.

She loves to fall back on super tired gender roles, she twice says she is “jealous” of gay men (once because they get to come out, something she would like to do, and once because people don't judge them for not having children), she makes fun of men with small penises, for no real reason she just decides that's an important subject to randomly bring up in order to make a pseudo-philosophical point which AGAIN relies on the idea that women's lives end at 40 (see page 194 if you want to read this lovely passage).

On page 177 she admits for the first time that mothers, people with children, can have complex internal lives unrelated to children. This is the first time she has expressed any awareness of this fact.

I don't think this even encompasses all my frustrations, but I am tired of thinking about this book.

*

There were a few things I liked: I liked when she puts in brief paragraph-long interludes to describe vivid, surreal dreams she's had. I liked the really quite lovely parts towards the end of the book where she reconnects with her mother, and where she goes to the sea with her partner and his daughter and his daughter's mother. Now and then there is a nice or insightful comment, but they are hard to pick apart from the repetitive and frustrating stuff.

I think if this book had had a better editor, and was less like reading someone's literal unedited diary, it would have the potential to be an actually good book.

If you read this far, hi, thank you for coming to my TED Talk about why I disliked this book. If you liked it because it spoke to you, I am happy for you! You probably had a better experience reading it than I did and I am not judging. These were just my feelings, informed by my life.