What ‘sad mum lit’ doesn’t say about parenthood

Almost 12 years ago, before I went on maternity leave, a friend loaned me Rachel Cusk’s 2001 book A Life’s Work, a visceral account of the early months of new motherhood.

Later, my friend messaged me with panicked second thoughts, urging me not to read about colicky crying and lost identity for fear it would plunge me into despair. Her warnings were such a deterrent that later the book took on fantastical properties in my sleepless imagination; I feared reading it in case its contents propelled me to foist my golden-haired infant on to a passing stranger.

Since then, myriad authors have written about the dark side of motherhood, in thrillers like The Push by Ashley Audrain and The Upstairs House by Julia Fine as well as Claire Kilroy’s novel Soldier Sailor, Sheila Heti’s autofiction Motherhood and Lara Feigel’s memoir Free Woman.

This deluge of, for want of a better term, “sad mum lit” has served as a corrective to the veneration of motherhood, and gives a literary voice to a period of women’s lives typically dismissed as emotional and incoherent. However, these books on maternal ambivalence and struggle could have negative consequences. In a recent essay in the online magazine Vox, journalist Rachel Cohen explains “How millennials learned to dread motherhood”. She writes that: “Women my age have absorbed cultural messaging that motherhood is thankless and depleting, straining careers, health, and friendships, and destroying sex lives. Today, it’s genuinely difficult to find mainstream portrayals of moms who are not stressed to the brink, depressed, isolated, or increasingly resentful.”

No one is solely blaming books for declining birth rates. High childcare and housing costs are a deterrent. More positively, social shifts are encouraging increasing numbers of men and women to shrug off conventions and choose a child-free life.

Yet, like Cohen, I find myself hankering for a more joyful portrayal of parenting. The problem is that describing…