Gender and sexuality

Hill’s book is essential, if not easy reading. She also answers the question which will be in most people’s minds as they read this book: what is to be done?

Because of its locations, its desires, and its literary influences, this is a novel that creaks with the weight of familiarity; this is not a fault.

It’s strange to think about it now, but when I first embraced knitting in public, my friends and family struggled with the idea that I might want to knit somewhere other than within the confines of my home.

I go to memoir because there, someone understands what this is like, to be smaller and more fragile and vulnerable to those ‘large, heavy bodies spilling out of doorways’, to ‘feel the micro-aggressions as macro’ (Atkinson), to grow up in a world where even your own father says things like ‘Good day—for a rape’ (Lilley) to old ladies, even though he doesn’t mean you, of course not you, love.

‘Across all its sectors, book culture remains a game that is stacked against women.’

‘Are notions of literary value – of excellence – of prize winning and canons – so deeply associated with masculinity that we should try not to use them at all?’ 

‘Consider the progressive loss of the liberties of pseudonymity and anonymity so valuable, historically, to women writing literary fiction…’

‘Nothing I had written seemed progressive or ‘Feminist’ enough. Was I meant to open with a sexist incident from a male superior (the whiter the better)?’

How to describe the current motherhood-memoir nexus? Owing to commercial pressures, nonfiction books by women writers dealing in any way with motherhood are unlikely to be sold as books of thinking, exploration, reportage, cultural critique or all the above. Instead they are dubbed motherhood memoirs. At the same time writing about mothering has become constrained, made predictable, by certain memoiristic tropes, vocabularies, intensities and scales. I don’t want to make any big declarations about how when you spit in a bookshop you hit a memoir, except to note it’s not only women, it’s brain surgeons, the children of spies, young writers with hybrid identities, survivors of trauma, each getting pushed down the memoir route by their publishers or agents or maybe by their own sense of what kind of books are possible and wanted.

My longing for a baby will seep through my life, but if having a disability has taught me anything, it is that there are limits to my ability to support my art and a child, just as there are limits to the resources of our world.