Her new book, Natural Disaster, published earlier this summer, is just as good and just as funny as her first. This time, she’s writing about an unnamed mother of two young children, and the 24 hours that precede her going back to work after her second – and probably last – maternity leave.

“For her, definitely foreclosing on the possibility of another child feels devastating and painful, yet she can’t deny the frequently overpowering sense that they have likely reached capacity.” – Natural Disaster

She’s resentful (her husband is away at a tech conference), she’s frazzled (there’s a harrowing scene in which a double buggy gets jammed in a door) and she’s just trying to get through the day.

I caught up with Lisa over email to discuss Natural Disaster and the books she loves about motherhood and family.

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^{Lisa Owens}

Lynn Enright: This novel describes a mother who’s still at the beginning of it all: she has a toddler and a baby. Why did you want to focus on that stage when you’re now at a different stage of parenting, with slightly older kids? Had you taken notes during those early years, or how did you get back to that place?

Lisa Owens: Those early years were characterised by an intensity and vividness in the moment that felt irresistible from a writing point of view. When my kids were really young, I remember being astounded by the physical and logistical challenges of caring for two small children at different developmental stages – one who needed to be attached to me at all times for survival, and one who was active and curious and ‘at large’ in the world, who needed completely different things from me, and from a day.

Exhausting and hard though it was, the writer part of my brain could see how funny and absurd and epic it was too – a condition that we tend to view as completely mundane and unexceptional, but when you are in it, it feels as though what is required of you is superhuman, and sometimes impossible. That all felt like a fertile scenario for a novel.

From a plotting and technical point of view, the immediate and constant needs of very young children were quite a useful device in maintaining and escalating tension, especially when combined with the mother’s internal landscape – concerns about going back to work, her marriage, and whether she might be, despite her best efforts, failing spectacularly on all fronts.

In terms of accessing that place to write about it, I hadn’t really taken notes, but of course like most parents I had taken thousands of photos of my children, and found that just by swiping through any given month I could immediately recall the sensations and impressions of that time, which was helpful in constructing the moment-to-moment element of the book.

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LE: I found the depiction of the relationship between the main character and her husband really touching and sad at times – this inevitable distance in a couple is created when they have kids. Did you know you wanted to explore that when you started writing the book?

LO: Having a baby can have a profoundly paradoxical impact on a relationship: on the one hand a child is sort of like an extreme bonding agent for the couple, but at the same time, the challenge of new parenthood exposes inequalities and activates feelings and dynamics that might otherwise have lain dormant, and I wanted to try and think about that paradox and how on earth any partnership manages to weather it.

In the book, the protagonist is very reliant on her husband in lots of ways, but also – maybe because of this – she views him as an adversary. I think a lot of people in heteronormative couples are blindsided when having children by how regressive it can feel in terms of gender politics, despite best efforts by both parties to strive for equity, and this was something I knew I really wanted to tackle from the outset.

It is difficult territory to write about because it risks amplifying quite retro ideas about marriage and family – it would be so nice to pretend we have solved the problem of domestic inequity! – but I don’t think I know any mothers who weren’t at least a bit flummoxed by how uneven the scales were, professionally, physically, emotionally, domestically, after having children.

LE: What are your favourite books about motherhood?

LO: The Millstone by Margaret Drabble, which is about a young student in London in the 1960s, who gets pregnant after a one night stand with an acquaintance, and decides to have and raise the child by herself. The protagonist is such an appealing mix of naïveté and steeliness, and I love the way these qualities inform her choices. Becoming a mother doesn’t transform her, it rather brings her more fully into herself – but at the same time, the novel doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of parenthood, and especially single parenthood. Drabble treads the line between the unholy terror and blazing love of motherhood perfectly.

Also I want to shout out to The Cazalet Chronicles, which aren’t about motherhood per se, but I think Elizabeth Jane Howard writes children magnificently, which is extremely rare. She treats them with the same seriousness as her adult characters, and therefore manages to capture their essence and vivacity in even the most brief, fleeting moments: bickering in the bath, scrabbling around in the garden, whispering in an attic bedroom.

LE: The book has been out in the world, read by real readers, for a month now. What do you think readers are connecting to most?

LO: I think perhaps the toggling between the very pragmatic mundane elements of daily life with the protagonist’s interior life – I have been really pleased that non-parents have responded to the book too, because although of course it’s ‘about’ motherhood, it’s also on a very fundamental level about trying to get through a day, which sometimes (and perhaps increasingly these days) can feel like quite a major undertaking.

LE: This newsletter is called How’s Everyone Doing?, so I always ask everyone: how are you doing today? How’s your day, your life, your work, your parenting going today?

LO: You catch me in quite an unusual situation where I am alone in my own home (!) – I’m going to join my family on holiday soon, but have a few days before then to myself to work. So my day feels unbelievably luxurious, because I have only myself to answer to (though obviously that also feels quite daunting as I worry I’m going to squander this precious time).

My life feels similarly limbo-like, being in the post-publication period, where I’m still thinking and talking about Natural Disaster but also trying to conceive of what comes next.

And parenting wise, I guess I’m doing it long distance this week, which means it’s happening internally – missing my children, glad to have a few days off thinking about what they will have for dinner, feeling guilt at being apart from them, feeling worried I won’t make the most of this time without them on the work front, missing them again. The whole soup!

LE: And related to that, why did you decide to focus on just one day in this novel?

LO: I wanted to try and conjure the real-time feeling of life with small children, so a day felt like the natural container with its inbuilt rhythms: waking up, meals, outings etc. I was quite influenced by the picture books I used to read with my children when they were small to pass the long hours of a day (I wrote about this recently for The New York Times) – in those books, a day is full of drama and adventure, but you know that no matter what happens, everyone will end up safely tucked up in bed asleep, which feels very appropriate to the experience of parenthood (and perhaps also life).

Thanks for reading, don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already.

Natural Disaster is published by Virago.

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I want to be able to recommend a book that does the same for mothers, that takes you through the profound changes you’ll experience, but until recently, I hadn’t come across anything that does that exactly.

There are lost of books I found to be a comfort, or to be interesting, in those early days of motherhood – A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk; Little Labours by Rivka Galchen; Mothers, Fathers and Others by Siri Hustvedt – but still, there was nothing that summed up ALL the ways I felt life had changed.

Now, though, a new you-shouldn’t-give-birth-without-having-read-this-book book has been published. 

Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones looks at the emotional, physical and psychological impact of becoming a mother. The book is packed full of information about what happens to the brain and the body during matrescence (the term fist coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the process of becoming a mother). It examines how the individual parent’s life changes but, crucially, it also interrogates the institution of motherhood and the hyperindividualistic society that leaves mothers adrift, broke, isolated and exhausted. 

First published in June, it has just gone into its third print run, selling out of shops as people recommend it to each other, pressing copies into friends and family members’ hands. (The audiobook is also excellent.)

Matrescence is an enraging yet comforting book, intimate yet political. It is truly brilliant – and I was genuinely honoured to speak to Lucy earlier this summer. We spoke about finding the vocabulary to complain about the institution of motherhood; about the conservative notions behind the cost of childcare in the UK; and about fucking shit up.

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Lynn Enright: I’m not sure if you saw it but recently on Twitter, one user, a man, wrote a thread about how hard parenting is, pointing out that we, as a society, don’t speak about that. Another user, a woman, quote-tweeted him, saying something like “People, especially women, speak about this all the time.” She was maybe implying that he wasn't listening because it’s women who talk about it. Or implying that we talk about this too much… But I just think it gets to something about how difficult it is to talk about parenting and to make people listen. My husband and I talk about it a lot: Were we not listening before we had children, or is it too hard to describe, or too boring? Why do people feel like we don't talk about parenting, even when we do?

Lucy Jones: I think there are a lot of things going on there… I mean, you hear this idea that you can never imagine what it is like to be a parent until it happens to you, and you hear that a lot about pregnancy or birth, too. And, I suppose, in some ways, that's true. But I think that in our society and culture, in capitalist Western, Anglo-American society, it is most true. The social journey that people go on, particularly in the middle class, is that you go to school, then you have a job or a career, and you probably don't spend much time with younger children. I, like a lot of people my age, had never changed a nappy before having a baby. I’d never really seen breastfeeding. I'd certainly never seen a birth. And in my feminist education, and my cultural education, the intricacies of caregiving, and the maternal experience, were very much absent.

I think the reasons for that are really interesting and important. I think that making care work and caregiving invisible, and presenting it as non-work or easy, basic work, isn't just a coincidence. It is a mode that serves to benefit our hypercapitalist economic system, and it serves to make that work unpaid. It benefits the system to hide what it means to sustain human wellbeing and sustain human life – because it makes it possible to not pay for it and to not support it socially. If we “naturalise” caregiving and make it seem like it's a natural instinct of women, then we don't need to properly support it.

Also, I always really wanted to have children and be a mother one day, but there was something in my cultural upbringing, which meant, until it [becoming a mother] happened to me, I just thought it was not interesting. I thought that the maternal was not something to be interested in reading about or watching films about – not that they existed.

There are ideas of misogyny wrapped up in that, and the way living in patriarchy had made me feel about my own mother. My mother did work – she was a teacher – but I always felt that I didn't want to be the secondary career person. I wanted to have all the opportunities I could get. And so I think there was a sense of needing to detach from the mother in a different way to the father figure.

LE:  These are really interesting thoughts, because it's so complicated… It's so huge! So, yes, we are keeping this work invisible, keeping those conversations from happening in any sort of widespread or organised way. And then there’s your point about the mother, and how we grow up thinking – or hoping – that we will somehow be exceptional, be different to the typical mother. 

LJ: Exactly. Because the maternal experience is so underrepresented in so many ways, I grew up with this binary image of a good mother and a bad mother, and not with authentic or real depictions of motherhood. It almost seems like the mother figure is a kind of cipher for societal ideas and notions and maybe one of the reasons we don't listen to these conversations before it happens to us is that they're quite frightening. When you become a mother, society holds you to really oppressive and cruel standards.

LE: Yeah, I think that is really true. I wanted to talk to you about the bit in your book where you talk about how pregnant women are told “you can't eat that, you can't drink that.” But meanwhile they live in an environment that is dangerously polluted and has been shown to harm the foetus. I thought that was just such a clear and very depressing example of how society makes bringing up children an individual pursuit or problem. And I'm really interested in how we shift that thinking. It’s a very big job – but do you have any idea where we begin with that?

LJ: My book, Matrescence, is very much a critique of hyperindividualism. It's just gone so far, and it's got us into all sorts of trouble. I think one of the first steps is talking about it and having conversations with other women. Let's think about, and talk about, the environment that we're in. Certain areas that people live in are much more polluted and that's going to affect foetal and maternal health. The more information that is out there and shared, the more it can break down this sense of us as these adamantine machines that aren’t inextricably linked with our environment.

The pregnant woman is always being told to avoid certain things, the responsibility is really on her. But we need to demystify that, and bring out all the other different environmental factors, and illuminate the matrix that the pregnant woman is in…  That encompasses horrific racial and social health inequities. In the UK, there are enormous health disparities between different ethnic groups – and these are environmental issues. Hyperindividualism wants us to be siloed and wants us to think that we are responsible for ourselves – and I really think connection, and talking, can can break that down. As well as joining other groups, like, for example, Pregnant Then Screwed. 

LE: That tension between hyperindividualism and organising can be particularly apparent for mothers. Because pregnancy and motherhood is so isolating, as well. It can feel like such an isolating time, but actually, so much of what needs to happen is about community and organising. And I think that can happen online – but I wonder how we could make that happen in real life too.

When I look around me and I look at mothers I know, so many are just paralysed by shame – and, well, obviously tiredness. And I think if we can banish and dissolve the oppressive ideals of motherhood and all the different ways that women are made to feel shamed, then that could could release energy.

Systemic and structural change is very necessary. But maybe a first step is to banish shame. Lots of new mothers  – I include myself in this – just feel ashamed and are struggling in a way that makes it hard to connect to other people. Since the book has come out, I’ve had hundreds of messages from people saying something like, ‘I didn't feel that I could say this stuff.’

It took quite a lot for me to have the courage to even say some of the stuff that I said about the institution of motherhood – because it felt that I was saying I was ungrateful. I was worried that people would think I take my kids for granted, or I was ungrateful about these beings who I love more than anything. And that's really tricky. There is a sense that if you ‘complain’ about your role as a mother, it could be equated with saying you don’t love your kids or, or you're not grateful for them. 

So I think a lot of it is is allowing people a safe space to be honest about how they're feeling and to empower women in a place where they can connect with each other and say, ‘You know, I love my kids more than anything and I really need better childcare or and my post-birth health care has been incredibly shit.’ You know, without feeling ashamed. 

I've noticed that there are loads of matrescence activism and matrescence coaches at the moment and I think the term matrescence is quite transformative, because it’s quite a neutral term. So I feel like those spaces could be places where women could go and be together and fuck shit up.

LE: I think that's a really good point about the term actually, and it goes back to my first question about us needing more vocabulary to talk about these things. And yes, having that neutral term is really useful. 

I have another question I wanted to ask you – about the cost of childcare in the UK. I've just moved back here – and it’s insane. I would say that here and the more expensive parts of America have become outliers, in terms of how much childcare costs. I mean it’s so, so expensive. I wanted to ask what you think that suggests about the UK in 2023?

LJ: I think that the state of childcare at the moment shows how very conservative the UK is. It is much more conservative, I think, than you might realise until you enter the institution of motherhood. The lack of affordable childcare is essentially a state mandate for women to stay at home for the first few years. And that's an ideological position which is very different from the rest of Europe. I think that we actually have, when it comes to motherhood particularly, very entrenched and deeply conservative gender roles.

Maybe it's because John Bowlby, who came up with attachment theory, and Donald Winnicott – these guys, actually were working in the UK. And I think that their teaching and their work on the family unit has been slightly distorted. Bowlby said that the mother-infant dyad is obviously very important but the mother can't do it alone, the mother needs collective support and society to help her. But we seem to have forgotten that.

It's paradoxical though, right? Because at the same time, we have a cost-of-living crisis – your rent or mortgage is really expensive. I feel that I am both expected to be at home with my children full-time, but also to be part of a dual-income household. So I work nights and weekends, we don’t have much childcare at the moment. But it’s mind boggling, the pressures on women. So after nine months, your maternity leave is over, and you’re expected to start earning again. I have had so many dreams and thoughts of like, ‘How can I clone myself?’ Like how can I literally clone myself? How can I make more hours in the day to both work and to parent?

LE: I’ve called this newsletter How's Everyone Doing? And so I wanted to ask how you're doing today and how parenting is working out for you today. You did tell me at the beginning of the call that you were all very seasick yesterday…

LJ: Yeah, so we had this medieval crossing on the ferry yesterday. I was on the top deck of the ship with my four-year-old and my two-year-old, both were vomiting. I was vomiting. One of them kept trying to run off, it was really unsafe. And my husband was downstairs with our six-year-old trying to help her. We were on a ferry going to France on a holiday – it’s a massive privilege – but it also reminded me of those times that I've had a sense of feeling like this doesn't feel sustainable or safe: To be mostly one person, or often one person, caring for young children without more help or support.

But my husband's on holiday this week, and that means I can do some work today. And that's good. This last while [since Matresence was published] has been very gratifying in terms of being in touch with other women. I feel optimistic and hopeful about change. And I feel like we need a revolution. We need radical change. And I'm excited about an eco, maternal feminism, centring caregivers and tearing down a system which doesn't serve us anymore.

***

Just a little message to subscribers… Thank you so much to everyone who has subscribed: if you like this newsletter, please do pass it on to somebody that you know would like it, too. If you are a paying subscriber: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU. As I get better at Substack, I aim to introduce features (and extra writing) that will actually make it properly worthwhile to pay for a subscription – but in the meantime, your generosity acts as a really useful spur for me to find the time to produce this newsletter. (I’m writing this at 10:34pm on a hot Thursday night, please excuses the typos.) I am so grateful and so touched. Thank you.

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