What does it mean to be a mother?
Twenty writers speak out in this searingly honest, diverse and powerful collection.
The Best, Most Awful Job
Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood
Edited by Katherine May
Elliott & Thompson / 19 March 2020 / £12.99 / HB
Motherhood is life-changing. Disorientating, overwhelming, intense on every level, it can leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself. Yet despite more women speaking out in recent years about the reality of their experiences – good, bad and in between – all too often it’s the same stories getting told, while key parts of the maternal experience still remain unspeakable and unseen. There are a million different ways to be a mother, yet the vision we see in books, on screen and online overwhelmingly fails to represent this commonplace yet extraordinary experience for most of us. It’s time to broaden the conversation.
The Best, Most Awful Job is a deeply personal collection about motherhood in all its raw, heart-wrenching, gloriously impossible forms. Overturning assumptions, breaking down myths and shattering stereotypes, it challenges perceptions of what it means to be a mother, bringing together a diverse range of bold and brilliant writers and asking you to listen.
Some highlights include:
Hollie McNish on her trademark outspoken and sane form
Josie George writing beautifully and carefully about mothering yourself and your child when your body won’t play ball
Michelle Adams on meeting your adoptive child and learning to be a mother
Peggy Riley on the lost heartbeat of a deeply yearned-for child
Mimi Aye on the pain of her children being seen as ‘other’ in their own country
Leah Hazard - practising midwife and author of Hard Pushed - on the scars our bodies hold as mothers...
Stories also cover: being unable to conceive, step-parenting, losing a child, single parenthood, being an autistic mother, being a reluctant home-schooler and the many ways in which race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect motherhood.
‘All the pain, power and privilege of being a mother is here in these tales of step-parenting; being unable to conceive; having six children; single parenthood; and of how race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect our perceptions of motherhood’ - Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller Editor’s Choice
ABOUT KATHERINE MAY
Edited and curated by Katherine May, an author of fiction and memoir whose most recent works have shown a willingness to deal frankly with the more ambiguous aspects of parenting. In The Electricity of Every Living Thing she explored the challenges – and joys – of being an autistic mother, and sparked a debate about the right of mothers to ask for solitude. In the forthcoming Wintering, she looks at the ways in which parenting can lead to periods of isolation and stress. She lives with her husband and son in Whitstable, Kent.
CONTRIBUTORS
Michelle Adams grew up in the United Kingdom, but currently lives in Limassol, Cyprus where she lives with her family and two cats. She has written two psychological thrillers, and her next release, Little Wishes, is a love story set in Cornwall, stretching across five decades of life. Michelle writes fulltime, and can occasionally be found working as a scientist.
Javaria Akbar is a freelance writer. She has contributed to The Guardian, The Telegraph, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, The Pool, Munchies, Vice, Dazed Beauty and more. She is also a part-time cookery writer and mother of two.
Charlene Allcott is a graduate of the Penguin Random House WriteNow programme and author of two novels: The Single Mum’s Wish List and More Than a Mum. She was born in Croydon and now lives in Brighton.
British-born to Burmese parents, MiMi Aye has always moved between two worlds, and her life at home in the suburbs of London with her husband and two children is very different from the life spent with her family back in Burma. Her latest book, Mandalay: Recipes & Tales from a Burmese Kitchen, was described by Nigella Lawson as “a really loving and hungry-making introduction to a fascinating cuisine” and by Tom Parker-Bowles as “a glorious revelation … autobiography, history and recipes all rolled into one magnificent whole ... a brilliant, beguiling book". She is on Twitter and Instagram as @meemalee and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/itsmeemalee
Jodi Bartle is a New Zealander who has lived in London for nearly twenty years. In-between, she has written for Vice, i-D, Chanel, Quintessentially, Gaggenau, Selfridges, Sunseeker and The London Mother on photography, interior design, fashion, art, travel and babies, in both print and on-line form. She is currently part of the journalistic and editorial team at MCCA’s Diversity & the Bar, a US-based publication which highlights diversity issues in the legal profession, and spills all her embarrassing parenting stories via her blog theharridan.
Playwright, screenwriter and prose writer, Sharmila Chauhan’s work is often a transgressive meditation on love, sex and power. Her plays include Be Better in Bed, The Husbands (Soho Theatre), Born Again/Purnajanam (Southwark) and 10 Women (Avignon Festival). Both her short films (Girl Like You, Oysters) were produced by Film London and her feature Mother Land was long-listed for the Sundance Writers’ Lab. Sharmila also has a degree in pharmacy and a PhD in clinical pharmacology. She lives in London with her husband, son and daughter and cat Tashi. You can find her at www.sharmilathewriter.com
Josie George lives with her son in a tiny terraced house in the urban West Midlands. Her days are watchful, restricted and often solitary, in a large part because of the debilitating disability she’s had since she was a child, but also because she’s discovered that a slow, quiet life has much to teach her. Josie’s brave and singular memoir will be published by Bloomsbury in early 2021. In the meantime, she is working on a novel and writes blogs about her powerful and gently subversive way of looking at the world at bimblings.co.uk. You can find her on Twitter as @porridgebrain.
Leah Hazard is a serving NHS midwife, author of the Sunday Times bestselling memoir, Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story, and mother of two children. She lives in Scotland with her family and continues to write about the many wonders and challenges of women’s journeys to motherhood.
Joanne Limburg has published non-fiction, poetry and fiction. Her most recent books are the memoir Small Pieces: A Book of Lamentations (Atlantic Books) and the poetry collection The Autistic Alice (Bloodaxe Books). She lives in Cambridge with her husband and now-teenage son.
Susana Moreira Marques is a writer and journalist whose first book, Now and at the Hour of Our Death, was published in 2015. She was born in Porto in 1976 and now lives in Lisbon, where she writes for Público and Jornal de Negócios. Her journalism has won several prizes, including the Prémio AMI – Jornalismo Contra a Indiferença and the 2012 UNESCO ‘Human Rights and Integration’ Journalism Award (Portugal).
Dani McClain writes and reports on race, reproductive health, policy and politics, and is the author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. She is a contributing writer at The Nation and a fellow with The Nation Institute. Her writing has appeared in outlets including Slate, Talking Points Memo, Al Jazeera America, EBONY.com and Guernica, and her feature reporting has received awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.
Hollie McNish is a writer based between Cambridge and Glasgow. She has published three poetry collections, Papers, Cherry Pie and Plum, and one poetic memoir on politics and parenthood, Nobody Told Me, about which The Scotsman said: ‘The world needs this book”. Her next book, Slug: And Other Things I’ve Been Told To Hate, will be published in February 2021 and is a collection of poems, memoir and short stories. She normally likes her tea with two sugars.
Saima Mir is an award-winning journalist. She started her career at the Telegraph & Argus and went on to work for the BBC. She is a recipient of the Commonwealth Broadcast Association’s World View Award, and has written for numerous publications including The Times, The Guardian and The Independent. Her essay for the anthology It’s Not About the Burqa appeared in Guardian Weekend and received over 250,000 hits over two days. Her novel The Khan will be published by Oneworld in 2021.
Carolina Alvarado Molk was born in the Dominican Republic, and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a PhD in English from Princeton University, and is currently working on a collection of essays about her experiences growing up undocumented.
Emily Morris is an author and freelance journalist from Manchester, UK. My Shitty Twenties, her memoir of single parenthood, was named a Guardian readers’ favourite book of 2017, and has been optioned for a TV series, which is in development. She is currently working on a novel.
Jenny Parrott is publishing director of Point Blank, the literary crime imprint at prize-winning independent publisher Oneworld, and she teaches creative writing. She also writes WW2-set sagas under the names Kitty Danton and Katie King, with series currently at Orion and HarperCollins.
Huma Qureshi is an award-winning author, journalist and blogger. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian and The Observer, as well as several other national publications including The Times, The Independent and New Statesman. Her first book, In Spite of Oceans, a collection of short stories, won The John C Laurence Award from The Authors' Foundation. Her blog, Our Story Time, is a collection of her personal writing.
Peggy Riley is a playwright and writer. Her novel, Amity & Sorrow, is about how we make families, however strange they might appear. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for prizes including Bridport and the Costa Short Short prize. Her work for theatre has been produced off-West End and on the fringe, on tour and in community, for radio and site-specifically. Originally from Los Angeles, Peggy lives on the North Kent coast with a husband and an enormous golden retriever. You can find her at www.peggyriley.com
Michelle Tea is the author of ten books, the founder of literary non-profit RADAR Productions, the co-creator of Sister Spit, and the curator of Amethyst Editions, a collaboration with the Feminist Press. Her most recent book is Against Memoir.
Tiphanie Yanique is a poet, novelist and essayist, and Professor of English and of African American Studies at Wesleyan University. Born in the Virgin Islands, she lives in New Rochelle, New York, with her family. Her 2016 poetry collection, Wife, won the Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the Forward Felix Dennis Prize for a first collection. She has written for publications including the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, the Wall Street Journal, and American Short Fiction.