One of the exciting, seat-of-the-pants things about doing a literary festival, is not only the experience that is the toilets after three days of use by fellow festival goers... and Port Eliot does have posh ones with that gorgeous deep blue flush that are emptied regularly, though by Sunday afternoon the wear and tear is noticeable, but it's also about reading the books in advance of talking with the authors.
I will be talking with Helen Walsh and Eleanor Birne on the Walled Garden stage so I'm doing my homework very assiduously which has involved a read of Helen's forthcoming novel Go To Sleep and Eleanor's account of her first year of motherhood, When Will I Sleep Through the Night - An A-Z of Babyhood
Helen Walsh's book is billed as
'issue-led fiction...devastatingly honest and shockingly painful at times...heart-wrenching story about one woman and her newborn child...strips motherhood bare...the book that everyone will have an opinion on...'
None of which I pay too much heed to because I like to decide those things, but I really should have known better than to find myself halfway through and unable to stop turning the pages very late one night. It was one of those nights where you eventually stop reading because you're eyes feel like a gravel pit and refuse to stay open a minute longer, but the book is indeed harrowing and had my brain whirring away at the speed of light, so fat chance of sleep....which now I think on it seems very apt given the book's central theme of those days of relentless sleep deprivation following the birth of a baby.
Thirty year old youth worker Rachel Massey finds herself happily single and unexpectedly pregnant after a one night stand with an old infatuation. Initially ambivalent, it is an early scan, when she thinks she may have lost her baby and subsequently finds all is well, that sets Rachel on that ante-natal course of hopes, dreams and much love invested in her 'bean'...
'And the moment I saw it, that tiny pulse on the monitor, the struggling mass no bigger than a kidney bean, that was it. That was me, gone - smashed with a love more ferocious than anything I'd ever known.'
The book opens as Rachel, on maternity leave, is approaching her due date, now the size of a beached whale, and with the aid of flashbacks to fill in what has gone before, it was with some trepidation that I approached Rachel's delivery alongside her.
Trained to spot when expectations might be pitched high, and therefore the reality all the more bruising, I was braced ready to catch Rachel. The best laid birth plans frequently don't translate into actuality, mainly because the baby hasn't read them, but also because who can know what lies ahead twixt first twinge and eventual birth if you haven't done it before.
But, if you've been through it, who can ever forget the exhaustion with which most women embark on what follows. Frequently sleep deprived through a long labour, then that ridiculously magical night of awe and wonder when I for one lay awake wondering how did I do that, and how on earth had the baby lying in the perspex cot next to the bed fitted within, and where had everything else inside me gone while it did etc. And with hormones flying in all directions it's no wonder that someone only needed to look at me and say 'You look tired' on Day Three for me to burst into tears.
And I was planning to stay in the maternity home for ten days as we did back in the 1980s and would be going home to masses of help and support; Rachel however is a twenty-first century mother, single, going home alone after a few days, fiercely independent and there's the shopping to be done.
What follows is insidious, visceral, disturbing and makes for very uncomfortable reading at times as Rachel's mental health becomes increasingly fragile and unpredictable, dissembling to all around her whilst slowly descending into a state as near to puerperal psychosis as you are ever likely to read, and the likes of which I haven't read anywhere else, or expressed quite so powerfully, but for The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
And in the midst of all this confusion is little baby Joe...who I wanted to airlift out when it becomes clear that Rachel isn't bonding with him at all, indeed thinks he hates and has rejected her in the midst of her seriously compromised decision-making skills and borne of complete and unrelenting exhaustion. Unable to contain her own anxiety Rachel is incapable of containing Baby Joe's and he screams his fear loud at every opportunity. And that stark realisation that I wanted to rescue him from that situation became a turning point in my reading of the book because this is where Helen Walsh excelled ... by forcing me to make the judgement as a reader that can be so commonly made about women who are suffering from post-natal depression...that somehow they are unfit mothers and their babies should be removed, and me who thanks to the day job most certainly knows different
In fact there were moments when all my safeguarding antennae were waving like crazy, Joe was definitely at risk, Rachel most certainly needed help, but it is at this point that it becomes most crucial that mothers and babies stay together and with good support in place to keep them safe, and all I was hoping for was that this would all come right on the next page...or the next one.
Of course I'm not going to say a word more about the plot other than to say, having worked with so many mothers with post-natal depression and several with puerperal psychosis, this book has added real insights into how the mind may be working in situations like this.
I have done some interesting new birth visits in my time and many where post-natal depression loomed. I once visited a mum who was holding her baby over the kitchen sink as I arrived and telling me it was a kitten and she had to drown it, another who opened the front door, handed me the screaming baby out on the garden path in the pouring rain and shut the door in my face. Tragically another who eventually several years later did commit suicide, and reading Go To Sleep has forced me to relive and rework those cases with a renewed understanding. It can be truly terrifying for everyone and Helen Walsh takes no prisoners, rooting her narrative in that terror and the mother's innate fear that this won't come right.. no wonder I couldn't sleep.
There is a beautifully telling moment for Rachel...
'None of it was my fault - I know that now...'
and the words 'this is not your fault' the most crucially important ones anyone can ever offer to a woman with post-natal depression, because anyone who has suffered from it (and I haven't) will probably recognise that self-blame comes very high on the list of things to beat yourself up about, quickly followed by guilt over not bonding with the baby, guilt about not being able to sort the house, cook, shop and feed a baby at the same time, guilt about not wanting to go out, guilt about not being able to get ready even if you did want to go out, guilt that everyone else seems able to do all these things ...the list is endless and punishing and very very real.
So if I was going to sum this book up how would I do it...
'issue-led fiction...devastatingly honest and shockingly painful at times...heart-wrenching story about one woman and her newborn child...strips motherhood bare...the book that everyone will have an opinion on...'
...they were right and there will certainly be opinions on this one which I shall be looking at with interest.
Helen Walsh has written a brave and uncompromising novel that absolutely needed to be written.
More about Eleanor Birne's book to follow.
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