Mummy’s the word
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Mummy-lit is where chick-lit goes to grow up, get married, have a child (or three) - and now there’s no time for the sex, shopping and scented candles that feature so heavily in young women’s books. Like trendy children’s names, which seem to appear from nowhere and then spread across the land within months, Mummy-lit is a publishing concept that never existed, until one day it was everywhere. Last month four big “mummy” novels came out, all aiming at the same narrow, middle-class readership.
The marketing and timing are just right. As the authors and readership of 1990s chick hits grow up and have children, there should be a large market for these books. Even Sophie Kinsella, cheerleader of the chick-lit pack, has apparently moved on with her new book, Shopaholic and Baby. But the title is misleading: Kinsella’s regular heroine, Becky Bloomwood, is pregnant, but the baby doesn’t emerge until the last chapter. So this is still perfect and relentlessly upbeat chick-lit, with an added twist of slightly deranged pregnancy behaviour.
But true “mummy-lit” books are geared to a different market: the older, saggier and (frankly) less glamorous mother. These books are narrated by stay-at-home mothers with school-age children. This domestic setting is curiously old-fashioned, and sets the new mummy-lit genre apart from Allison Pearson’s pioneering 2002 novel I Don’t Know How She Does It - the tale of full-time City fund manager and part-time mother Kate Reddy.
Pearson’s opening scene gives us Kate in her kitchen at 1.30am, attempting to “distress” supermarket-bought mince pies with a rolling pin in an attempt to make them look home-made for the school Christmas party. “And home-made is what I am after here. Home is where the heart is. Home is where the good mother is, baking for her children.”
The mince-pie scene has become the ur-text of mummydom, the standard against which working mothers judge the hopeless attempts to be as “good” as the saintly stay-at-homes. I think about it every time I’m up at midnight, icing the fairy cakes that I have baked after a full day’s work, having put the kids to bed and completed my evening chores. It would be cheaper and quicker for me to give my daughter a fiver to give to the school kitty. But that’s not the point. Baking is in our genes, if not our skill-sets.
It’s not surprising that mummy-lit ignores office life. Working mothers aren’t interesting book fodder - the conflict between work and family is a never-ending, unresolved tension that leaves little room for any other kind of plot development. Indeed, by the end of Pearson’s book her heroine has “resolved” her conflict by giving up the job: “Richard and I sold the Hackney heap, moved up to Derbyshire, near my family, and bought a place on the edge of a market town.”
Books set among stay-at-home women cut out the cyclical dullness of office politics and go straight to the hidden heart of “mummy world” (where few men, and many working mothers, don’t dare or care to go). It’s exposed in these novels as a surprisingly protocol-heavy and often unwelcoming place. Fran Clarke, the insecure narrator of Maria Beaumont’s book Motherland, explains: “If you want your kids to get on - that is, to get invited to the right parties - then you have to cosy up to their friends’ mums because it is they who draw up the invitation lists.”
Playground witches are quite pale as dark forces go, but they exist and cause real misery. And behind the scenes in mummy-lit there are plenty of other difficult themes - hard-to-handle children, drifting marriages, miscarriage, alcoholism.
In Motherland, Fran drinks to drown out her failing marriage and unfulfilled life. There is a really serious idea here - a mother who has never really recovered from barely mentioned post-natal depression and turns to alcohol: “I’m drinking myself into oblivion. I’ve looked, and, well, there really is nowhere else to go.”
But Beaumont bottles out. Her Fran is potentially the most interesting character in all of these novels - a working-class woman from London’s Bethnal Green who feels uncomfortable among the suburban smug marrieds. But the book’s secondary characters are unconvincing, there are sloppy spelling mistakes, and at the end the drink problem miraculously disappears. Errant husband returns, Fran starts working again, and they all live happily ever after.
Despite the potentially serious subject matter, all these novels use the comic narrative style and chirpy tone already familiar from chick-lit. The covers of these books scream “girls’ fiction” - what man would pick up a book with a pastel cover, the literary equivalent of a tube of Love Hearts sweets?
And there is plenty to laugh at here, including the easily mocked middle-class stereotypes (alpha mummy, yummy mummy, knit-your-own-tofu mummy). These types exist, they are funny, and we should accept that everyone’s style of mothering is labelled. We are all judged and judgmental.
In The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy, Fiona Neill conjures up a north London private-school staple: the woman who has given up her gigantic job to “do kids”. Lucy Sweeney (the slummy mummy) visits an ex-City slicker who now manages her brood using a shelf of high-powered parenting manuals while she co-ordinates after-school activities: “Kumon maths, Suzuki violin, chess, yoga for children”. This alpha mum asks Lucy which parenting philosophy she subscribes to. “’Slow mothering,’ I say, making it up as I go along. ‘It’s part of the slow-town, slow-food movement, aimed at producing free-range children.’ ‘Oh,’ she says, trying to mask her surprise. ‘I haven’t heard of that one.’”
So far, so funny. But do these books tell us anything about motherhood itself? Bringing up children can be fun. But it is a slippery, tricky thing, beset with guilt, anger and worry. It’s also lonely. And most “mothering” is about dealing with the mundane. There isn’t much time to ponder the inner workings of our souls or unleash our creative genius. As Cyril Connolly had it: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”
The long days (and nights) of motherhood are hard to write about in a way that doesn’t leave the reader gagging for a break and a glass of white wine (crucial for every female narrator from Bridget Jones onwards). And these writers are all mothers, themselves mentally and physically encumbered by the prams cluttering their own halls.
Instead of great thoughts, they drill deep into minutiae. Lucy Cavendish’s novel The Invisible Woman tries hard to give the reader an idea of the thousands of small things that fill mothers’ heads. She offers whole screeds on subjects such as the rules of playgroup, and the politics of television: “So here are my television-watching rules: Edward can watch it in the mornings because a. no-one wants to get up with him and b. it seems to be relatively educational. In the evenings he should not watch any other television apart from The Simpsons or something an adult wants to watch.”
Totally mundane. The cumulative effect is somewhere between stupor - do we want to go into so much detail? - and admiration that Cavendish/Smythe has actually formulated theories and rules about these things.
The first-person voice is a must in mummy-lit. What other perspective can there be? Cavendish’s Samantha Smythe is the most carefully fleshed-out protagonist in these new books, and her tale is the most satisfying. Her husband and three boys are vivid and separate, idiosyncratic souls (and presumably based on Cavendish’s own experience as a mother of three).
Neill’s The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy also offers us a mother with three boys, but her book suffers from having started life as a newspaper column (in The Times). It’s funny in places, but it feels episodic and far too long. There’s only so much sexual tension a reader can take - and it’s on overload in Slummy Mummy, in the form of Neill’s Sexy Domesticated Dad, the star turn in her column, here given a name (Robert Bass) and a wandering eye (and hand).
In all these books there’s a remarkable synchronicity of plot development. The crisis in all mummy-lit tales is infidelity, or the threat of it. At heart, these novels are not about motherhood at all. Mummy-lit is about the things that happen to women when they reach a certain age, find themselves in stale relationships, and happen to be mired in domesticity. But - as only happens with such regularity in the fictional world - everyone comes back from the brink (or beyond), marriages survive, and the interloper threatening a happy home is sent packing. It’s all as traditional as baking and sewing-in name-tapes.
In the end the zingy pace of these books, and their set-piece comic climaxes (not sexual climaxes, obviously) made me feel sullied and fed up - for these heroines are hopeless at engaging with life in the wider world.
This feels like a cold leftover from chick-lit. Ditzy may be funny in a twentysomething who has a job, a life and lots of friends, but these older women should have moved on. And they don’t define their own worlds - life is something that happens to them, they are at the mercy of not-very-benign external forces in the shape of tricky teachers, pushy alpha mothers, non-supportive husbands and backstabbing friends.
What’s especially depressing about these women is that no one (least of all their partners) takes them seriously, apparently because they are no longer in the salaried workforce. These are comfortably-off families, where wives don’t have to work - and their spouses like it that way because it means that childcare doesn’t interfere with their creative, long-hours jobs.
The whiff of the economically disempowered, miserable Victorian wife hangs heavy over these lives. Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina are not so far from the bored, tempted, miserable wives of London - it’s as if feminism never happened. Like most women these days, these mothers had great jobs BC (before children). We are even supposed to believe that Neill’s Lucy Sweeney, a woman who can’t even remember where she has parked her car, used to be a producer on Newsnight.
Cavendish’s Smythe still has a freelance column - on the contents of celebrities’ fridges. But even she, worried about a child who has swallowed poisonous berries, is sidelined by the hospital nurses when her husband arrives (”your wife has behaved in an unreasonable fashion”).
These big, easy, mostly funny books aren’t meant as a serious take on what it is to be a mother, however autobiographical some of the detail (and I suspect it’s spouse-wincingly close to the truth). That’s a shame. There’s plenty of thought-provoking, factual writing as well as fiction aimed at those who’ve just embarked on motherhood, including Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother and Anne Enright’s Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. But new motherhood is a very public time of your life - everyone wants a piece of you when you have a tiny baby, and you can walk for miles with a pram.
As children get older and less cute, the world shrinks - it is bounded by the family home, the walk to school, and the parks and lurid indoor play centres of the villages where we live (even inner London is just a series of small villages).
A mother’s world may be small, but many of us are still sorely in need of a good guidebook. These novels reflect a lot about my life: “Looking after children is like working on a coal face, except there’s never any break between shifts,” as Lucy Sweeney says. But I am still hunting for the book that tells me something brilliant, insightful and life-changing about being a mother.
posted by LeBlues @ 12:15 PM,
