CULTURE CLUB
A MOTHER BORN
OF MOTHERHOOD Ahead of her appearance at Cambridge Literary Festival, Edition speaks with author Lucy Jones about her groundbreaking new book, Matrescence The Metamorphosis
WORDS BY PHOEBE HARPER
Cambridge Edition: As a radical new examination of motherhood, what underexplored narratives did you want to tackle with the book? Lucy Jones: I wrote Matrescence partly to try and see clearly my experience of becoming a mother. That in itself was a challenge because pregnancy, birth and the complex realities of the maternal experience are so hidden, sanitised and bizarrely disavowed in our culture. In the writing, it felt taboo to simply write what had happened to my mind and body – through giving birth, feeding my baby, the impact of sleep deprivation, the existential metamorphosis, for example. The feeling that what I was writing was in some way wrong or seditious spurred me on. There’s an epidemic of obfuscation, misinformation and false-naming around maternal health and experience. From the misnomer ‘morning sickness’ to lies about natural childbirth and minimisation of the emotional heft of the immediate post-natal experience with the phrase ‘baby blues’. The breadth of deception was intriguing to me, so I wanted to interrogate what functions it serves and how things could be different. CE: What do you hope parents will take away from reading Matrescence ? LJ: My ambition for the book was to start conversations about the needs of new mothers and parents, about the true value of care-giving, the importance of social support, the inadequacy of healthcare and maternal subjectivity. I hope it gives people permission to speak more honestly
is peculiarly violent. Mothers are expected to work in a 21st-century way while being oppressed by adamantine social norms and expectations invented centuries ago. Care-giving in the early 21st century clashes catastrophically with neoliberal late-stage capitalism. The ideology of intensive mothering and the self-sacrificing maternal ideal is a proxy for collective care making it socially acceptable for the burden to fall on individual women. Matrescence illuminates the failing social ideas and structures. CE: Have you found this book to be a significant departure from your previous writing? LJ: Matrescence is more personal than my other books. I also came up against the limitations of English language in a new way. Our phallocentric language doesn’t yet have enough words for the maternal experience, the different forms of pain in childbirth for example. So I looked to my growing daughter and how intrinsically creative and experimental she is. That gave me the confidence to play with the text, have fun with typography, think about letters and words like paint and push the essential tools of language into new places. Much of these experiments are on the cutting room floor, but it was important to me that some character of the creative and playful experience of parenting was baked into the form of the book. The reaction has been hugely gratifying and unlike anything I’ve experienced before. It’s been very moving to hear from readers and realise there is a reservoir of power and possibility starting to burst.
THE RADICAL LENS Despite tackling rarely discussed topics, Matrescence maintains a creative tone
and might lead to consolation and companionship, as well as greater pressure on structures and systems which currently fail mothers. Everyone is ‘of woman born’ so I believe the new science of the brain, for example, could be interesting for everyone. It might illuminate what our own mothers went through to have us. I also hope it scratches away at the inadequate webs of social thought we are trapped in, which serve the few rather than the many. The modern institution of intensive, isolated motherhood in the Global North
CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK MARCH 2024 17
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