Author Lucy Ellmann Said What Women Aren’t Supposed to Say About Motherhood
“A woman writing a long book is considered audacious, if not outrageous,” British author Lucy Ellmann told the Independent in September. Ellmann would know: Her latest, Ducks, Newburyport, is a 1,000-page novel written in a single sentence, streaming from the mind of a mother of four in Ohio. But the length of her book—it has been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize—isn’t the only thing some find outrageous about her. The same is now being said about Ellmann’s recent comments about motherhood in an interview with the Guardian.
“You watch people get pregnant and know they’ll be emotionally and intellectually absent for 20 years,” Ellmann said. “Thought, knowledge, adult conversation, and vital political action are all put on hold while this needless perpetuation of the species is prioritized. Having babies is a strong impulse, a forgivable one, but it’s also just a habit, a tradition, like weddings or putting butter on popcorn.”
An adverse reaction (to say the least) flared on Twitter, mainly from mothers and creatives disputing that their intellect had been squelched by their children—a fair point, to be sure. “I’m a fan of Lucy Ellman, but these comments about motherhood are extraordinarily ill-considered. It’s ludicrous to suggest that women mentally shut down when they have a child,” one writer, Elizabeth Morris, tweeted. “I don’t see how any woman can claim to be feminist while saying stuff like this,” historian Charlotte Lydia Riley added. Quoth another Twitter user: “Going absolutely mad trying to imagine what Lucy Ellmann’s thoughts and knowledge would be like if she’d had babies.” Incidentally, Ellmann is a mother, but that last comment seemed nevertheless notable (and not just because the speculation came from a man) because it assumed that no one with children could possibly think critical, complicated thoughts about the institution of motherhood.
It was widely pointed out that mother-writers and other mothers who work outside the home are abundantly efficient, still surging with creativity and working their butts off to achieve their goals. As for political action, some pointed to New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern toting her baby to the floor of the U.N. General Assembly. That optimism, the ability to achieve your wildest dreams undeterred by children, may be true for those women, but it is not realistic for everyone. Perhaps not for Ellmann, and not for me either.
It doesn’t offend me to hear Ellmann say that motherhood can, potentially, dent your capacity to do your best, meaningful work outside the home; on the contrary, it makes me feel pretty seen. I would not say I am intellectually “absent” or politically inactive, but I also wouldn’t say I am 100 percent of who I think I could be. The fact of the matter is that, even with child care and as equal a partner as I could hope for in a patriarchal system, I have to fight hard to be a productive writer and to be politically engaged, and I continually fall short of doing as much as I’d ideally like to do because so much of my time, energy, and brain space is devoted to taking care of small children.
Writing that—admitting it, as if it were a sin—still feels prickly. The conversation around motherhood and gender roles and unpaid housework has compounded, but it still feels like we are supposed to paint a fundamentally optimistic picture in the end. We are allowed to say it’s hard and rage against the lack of federal paid leave for all, but only to a point. We are careful to punctuate our complaints with cheerful declarations about how much we love our kids. But both can be true: I love my kids so much it hurts, and, right now, being a mom makes it harder to be the writer I really want to be.
Ellmann herself referenced the taboos still limiting how we talk about motherhood in the very same Guardian interview. (Is anyone shocked the Twitter fracas lacked context?) “People don’t talk enough about how tiring, boring, enraging, time-consuming, expensive, and thankless parenthood is. Why must we keep pretending it’s a joy?” she said. “Sure, there are delightful elements: Children are endearing and fascinating, and if you have some, you get to play with toys again and read children’s books and remember your childhood. But illness, worry, conflict, overcrowding, the relentless cooking, the driving, the loss of privacy, the repression of your own sexuality, the education dilemmas, the lack of employment prospects, and all the wretched insanity of adolescence—these are big deterrents.”
There is a long, ongoing history of authors and artists in particular struggling with the idea of motherhood and art. It’s a conversation that should continue, but if it is going to be honest, there needs to be space for women like Ellmann to speak some of the darker truths. “How is it unimaginable that a mother can love mothers, respect them for all the work they do,” Sian Cain, the Guardian writer who interviewed Ellmann weighed in on Twitter, “and also be critical of the cost of that work?”
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Originally Appeared on Vogue
