All the parenting manuals I’d read were jokey and superficial. Then I turned to Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy

Un professeur d'université découvre - suite à son divorce - la voix profonde des femmes, une voix intime avec laquelle il explore une nouvelle relation avec ses propres enfants et avec la littérature.

It was not just that these motherhood memoirs spoke about parenting in a way that was closer to my own experiences, it was that they provided me with a language. Unlike the stories I had found in memoirs of fatherhood, which were isolated and disconnected, the women who wrote about motherhood were much more tuned in to other people’s experiences, past and present. Almost all the women on the list would weave their own personal narrative with stories of other women, whether Marguerite Duras, Simone de Beauvoir or Adrienne Rich. And they were not exclusively white and heterosexual. In Mother Is a Verb, the history professor Sarah Knott set her story alongside those of women of the past. Maggie Nelson, in The Argonauts, blends poetry, politics and philosophy to tell her story of pregnancy as the partner of a transgender man. Cho turns to Korean folklore to bring to life her experience of psychosis and her time on a ward, disconnected from her own child. Anna Prushinskaya, in A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother, turns to art. Cusk and Deborah Levy turn to literature.