The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (54 page)

It all adds up to an extreme version of what many new mothers experience, and the refreshingly offbeat humor, combined with Sophia’s beguiling voice, will have mothers laughing along with her as she does her best to play house without any help from her spouse. If you’re a new mother, you’ll be well prepared by absorbing some of her survivalist attitude.

For a more modern take on motherhood, Allison Pearson’s
I Don’t Know How She Does It
is a hilarious dissection of the juggling skills required to
hold down a top job, keep a lover, make some pretense at being married, and be a mother. The book begins with Kate Reddy, age thirty-five, up at 1:37 a.m. on the thirteenth of December, “distressing” store-bought mince pies to make them look homemade. She’s determined to at least seem like a “proper mother,” a “self-sacrificing baker of apple pies and well-scrubbed invigilator of the washtub” rather than the “other sort.”

By day Kate is a fund manager in a City firm, where her boss stares at her breasts “as if they were on special offer” and she keeps long hours, her main entertainment being an e-mail romance with the too-good-to-be-true Jack Abelhammer. She constantly agonizes about missing her children’s milestone moments—“Today is my son’s first birthday and I am sitting in the sky over Heathrow”—and rages against the misogynist world that has put her in this position. Her marriage seems decidedly last century, too, as she bears the brunt of all child-related organization, domestic chores, and school runs, albeit by remote control.

Pearson writes with such humor that reading this will pose a challenge to your postbirth pelvic floor muscles. If you haven’t yet entered the realm of motherhood but are curious about what goes on behind the fence, this novel will read as a warning against attempting to “have it all.” But those already living on that side of the fence will take much roguish delight as Kate Reddy gears up for her next move—still joyfully juggling the balls of marriage, career, and kids.

See also:
Children requiring attention, too many
•
Housewife, being a
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Mother-in-law, being a
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Single parent, being a
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Trapped by children

Daughters-in-Law

JOANNA TROLLOPE

L
adies, please pause to consider. If you are a mother-in-law, do you at least attempt to defy the cliché?
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Are you loving and supportive of your son- or daughter-in-law?
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Have you accepted him or her, gracefully, as he or she is?
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Do
you endeavor to see things from his or her point of view,
*
even if it contradicts your own offspring’s,
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knowing that in the end this will strengthen their marriage and, indirectly, help your precious child?

Of the three mothers-in-law (MILs) featured in Joanna Trollope’s rigorous exploration of intergenerational in-law relationships, it’s Rachel—the mother of three grown-up, married sons, and MIL to Sigrid, Petra, and Charlotte—who has the longest list of destructive behaviors to her credit. An energetic, efficient, protective “tiger” mother when her sons were growing up, she has become a forceful, interfering, invasive, controlling old cow now that they’re putting their own partners first. Charlotte’s mother, Marnie, appears on the surface to be benign—she’s generous, and wants to help out the couple financially. But they soon realize there’s a fine line between support and suffocation.

Of all the characters, it is Sigrid’s mother who provides a role model for how to be a second mother to your extra children. She insists, calmly, that you can let your adult children go successfully only if you have interesting, absorbing work—or some other creative outlet—of your own, plus a strong enough relationship with your own partner, if you have one. This will prevent you from begging your children for the time and attention they should be giving their own families.

Be loving, supportive, generous, understanding, kind, and fun. But make sure you don’t have the time to interfere.

See also:
Control freak, being a

Daughters-in-Law

JOANNA TROLLOPE

L
adies, we sympathize. MILs—mothers-in-law—can be forceful, interfering, invasive, controlling old cows who believe that no one will ever be good enough for their son or daughter, make no attempt to conceal how little they like you, always take their offspring’s side, and assume, by default, that you’re wrong.

But this doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. Intergenerational in-law relationships have got to be worked at from both sides. Think about it from the point of view of Rachel, one of the MILs in Trollope’s novel. Her identity as a woman is thrown off balance when her third son, Luke, gets married. Suddenly no one wants her to do the thing she’s good at anymore. Left without agency or power, she panics—and when she panics, as she admits herself, she “barks.” It’s not that she doesn’t like you; it’s that she doesn’t like this new person your arrival has forced her to be.

MILs need to be stood up to, and you must never be afraid to do this. The old family dynamic is obsolete and a new one must be built. But while it’s happening, be the sort of second child your adjusting MIL might like to have: loving, supportive, generous, understanding, kind, and fun. And make time to interfere.

See also:
Christmas
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Divorce
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Family, coping with
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Murderous thoughts

Heligoland

SHENA MACKAY

C
onsider the snail. His house is on his back, he can slither into it whenever he likes, and as long as no blundering oaf comes by with thoughtless feet, he’s always got his home to hand (or, rather, proboscis). We, on the other hand, are not so adaptable. When we move, we require moving vans, checklists, a small forest’s worth of cardboard boxes, packers, carriers, in-laws, nannies, dogsitters, and, afterward, therapists. It’s one of the most demanding and stressful events we go through in life, and causes a range of side effects, including angst, hair loss, and conflict within your relationship. Not to mention it throws your bank balance seriously off-kilter. To avoid these side effects completely, climb inside a box with this small but perfectly formed novel by Shena Mackay.

Heligoland
describes the residents of an unusual shell-shaped house called the Nautilus.
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Gleaming “like a pearl” and with an anchor at its heart connecting it to the seabed of London, the house was built in the 1930s by
Celeste and her husband as a place to bring artists and writers together. Now an old woman, Celeste still lives in the Nautilus, though the echoing house is not the hubbub of artistic life it once was. Its current occupants—including a minor poet and an antiques dealer—are jaded has-beens, one way or another. But there is Rowena too, an orphan of Indian extraction who has come to be the new housekeeper.

Rowena is a lost soul, drawn to the Nautilus and its intriguing denizens because she craves a combination of the lonely life she shared with her aunt in the Scottish Highlands as a child and the communal existence of her old boarding school. As she begins to feel at home in the quirky spaces, Rowena’s deep loneliness starts to abate. One day she shyly cooks up an Indian feast in the kitchen without telling anyone what she’s doing. The fragrances lure them from their shells, and they all appear, dressed for dinner, just like in the house’s heyday. Little by little, Rowena brings new life to the Nautilus, galvanizing the old crowd to throw a birthday party for her, to clear out the old swimming pool, and discover forgotten areas of the garden.

Mackay’s prose, lustrous as the pearly shell she describes, is precise and calm and will declutter your mind as you read. And you’ll be greatly inspired by Rowena’s ability to re-create the idealized dream home she’s imagined since her childhood, the Heligoland of the title: something between an island in unnavigable seas and a fairground merry-go-round. Catch her spirit of optimism as you, too, create your own dream home and start anew.

See also:
Broke, being
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Exhaustion
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Family, coping with
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Friend, falling out with your best
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Stress