PARENTHOOD: Anne Enright's book on motherhood doesn't pander to parents who think they are higher beings just because they've successfully reproduced. She talks to Hugh Linehan.
Anne Enright, creator of quirky, elegant fables about sex and death and life and identity, has gone off and written a book about what it's like to become a mother. How fluffy. How smug. How sentimental.
How wrong. Enright's new book, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood is neither fluffy nor smug, although it's certainly sentimental, except in the best sense. A highly original meditation on the implications, physical and metaphysical, of bringing another human being (or, in Enright's case, two human beings - daughter Rachel and son Lorcan) into the world, it has a lot to say about, well, sex, death, life and identity. And, yes, babies. There's the agony (a brilliantly excruciating portrait of her first labour), the ecstasy (the semi-delirious dreamtime of the first few weeks after birth). There is blood. There is shit. There are tears. There are good jokes. And there are some very interesting ideas about what the whole business might mean. For everyone.
"I don't know who it's for, actually," says Enright. "Someone said 'Oh I read something that had been in the Guardian, and I liked it, even though I'm a bloke'. Well round of applause. I'm really grateful. On behalf of the women of Ireland I'd like to thank you for being interested."
That piece about pregnancy, which appeared first in the Guardian's magazine, prompted a "ferocious response" on that newspaper's letters page, which Enright responds to sardonically in her mock-apologetic foreword: "I do really apologise for writing about aliens and God and mortality when I should be talking dimple, gurgle, puke-down-the-back-of-my-Armani-jacket, but I wanted to say something about the anxiety of reproduction, the oddness of it, and how it feels like dying, pulled inside out."
She sees "a sort of anxiety" around the whole subject, which extends to the very idea of writing about it. "I got a very strong reaction from some people who said they cried when they read the piece. So that's interesting, but I'm only becoming aware, now that the book is out, that some people have quite an anxiety about mothers writing about motherhood, because they think it must be mumsy and blowsy and extremely tedious. And because I know that it isn't, I wonder where their anxiety comes from."
Perhaps it's partly to do with that horrible self-righteousness which seems to infect certain members of the middle classes when they become parents. There seems to be a particular type of Nouveau Parents who believe that they have somehow ascended to some higher evolutionary plane simply by virtue of having successfully reproduced. "That really, really annoys me," Enright says. "Having a baby, you're doing pretty much what any sheep does in a field. It isn't that complicated, unless there's a problem. Non-reproducing people are great. They keep us all going. We really need people who haven't got kids, just to keep it all sensible. People get very fussed about children. They start having large opinions about them. I don't have large opinions. I think you just have to be as nice to them as possible."
There is, she agrees, a widely-held belief that there is just too much being written about this subject, which she finds rather strange. "One review said 'Oh, haven't we heard it all before?' I was thinking, 'Name two writers'. Because I was sure whoever it was couldn't name two writers who have actually really dug into the subject. There's a book by Ian Sansom called The Truth About Babies, which is really good, but I felt that a lot of writers thought they had to have an agenda. In Britain, it has always been about the NHS. There's no way of talking about birth; you have to talk about the health system. So I just wanted to slip in between those agendas." She stops herself short. "Actually, I didn't want to do anything. I just wanted to sit down and write it."
Which, it seems to me, is the source of the pleasure and strength of the book, most of it written in the two years between the births of Rachel and Lorcan. "The reason I kept writing about my babies, even when they were asleep in the room," she says in the foreword, "was that I could not think about anything else. This might account for any wildness of tone. The pieces were typed fast. They were written to the sound of a baby's sleeping breath."
They do have that sense of despatches from the front line, where everything has been thrown up in the air and nothing will be the same again. "Yeah, it's a muddle," she agrees. "You live extraordinarily simply. It's amazing how little you actually have to do in your life, apart from look after your baby. Everything else drops away, which you miss the first time around, but with the second there's nothing left to miss. It's almost a spiritual state, having a lot of your props stripped away. A lot of it is non-linguistic, so putting language on it is interesting."
And what, I venture (not too querulously, I hope), of fathers? "Because the whole idea of fatherhood is problematic in Ireland, you can't really talk about it in an ordinary, normal way. I'm very much in favour of fathers. Martin is there all the way through the book. He's a very enthusiastic and loving and hands-on father. I couldn't even dream of doing it without him. But I can't plunder his life. He'll have to do that himself."
While Making Babies touches on the various social and cultural pressures on parents today - the contradictory medical advice, the obsession with nutrition, allergies, the merits and demerits of childcare - it's clear Enright does not want to be sidetracked into writing a sociological pamphlet. At one point she starts talking about family structures in Ireland in comparison with other Western countries, then brings herself to a grinding halt. " I can't even start that sentence because it's not a sentence I'm interested in finishing. It is a very urgent and very necessary discussion, but what I'm trying to do is describe something before that discussion, which is the experience itself. I do think that if more people knew what it was really like, for example, there would be more maternity benefits here."
In its final chapter, Making Babies takes what seems at first an abrupt swerve, flashing back to two events earlier in the author's life - a diagnosis (probably incorrect) of lymphatic cancer when she was 16, and a suicide attempt in a bleak room in London in the mid-1980s. Mortality, and our relationship with death, and the idea of death, and how that idea changes as our lives go on - all these questions, which are threaded throughout the book, come suddenly and forcefully into the foreground.
"A friend of mine said that it packed a bit of a wallop," she says. "But he also said that it makes a book of it, and he's very much a non-breeder. I was uncertain about it, and asked a few people, who felt that it gave some ballast. There's no point in it just being Mrs Bliss. Everybody's happiness comes from somewhere potentially terrible. This is a particular story, but I think it's true of everyone. We all have our relationship with death, an extremely intimate relationship, and it is relevant to the whole business of life and what it means when there's new life. That whole idea was implicit while I was writing it, but I just felt that if you're on that road you have to go the distance. And that's me going the distance.
"I do say at the start of the book that birth felt like dying pulled inside out. And after the second birth, I realised that the next time I would be in that place was when I was actually dying. It's never actually said, but labour is a ferocious experience, and women historically were terrified of dying during it. The whole business is very close to the edge."
And mortality obviously takes on a different meaning once you have a child who depends on you? "You realise you don't have any of the exits you would normally have, death being one of those. You have to stick around now, and enjoy doing it. Which is in itself a certain, slight loss. This is a serious business. I'm not really writing about burps. In that way, it's very Irish - it's the way Irish mothers are. They do it big! I'm in that great tradition."
Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood is published by Jonathan Cape, £10.99 in UK