The five best books about motherhood according to Alice Vincent

Alice Vincent is the bestselling author of books including Rootbound and Why Women Grow. Her latest, Hark, examines how women experience sound, and how having a baby changed how she listened to the world. It is a luminous account of motherhood and music, in particular the intense auditory experience of childbearing – the swoosh of the ultrasound, the gentle “moth breath” (as Sylvia Plath called it) of a newborn, the nerve-shredding noise of your child’s full-throated bawl. Here, she shares the books about motherhood that have shaped her.

A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk

Perhaps the one that started it all off, it being autofiction about the grinding reality of mothers’ lives, at least. Cusk’s unflinchingly warts-and-all exploration of what it is to live with and raise two small children – the loneliness, the physicality, the monotony, interrupted by flashes of joy and creativity – caused far more of a skirmish than she had anticipated when she was writing it on the turn of the millennium.

“It was my sincere belief that nobody would read it or care about it, and in all honesty I didn’t blame them,” she wrote a few years later. Instead, A Life’s Work was excoriated – one critic said it held the potential to end the human race, so condemning was it of baby-raising. A quarter of a century on and it seems both a lodestar and a beginning. Cusk cracked through some of the many facades of society’s understanding of motherhood. Others wrote into the cracks.

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

Some women prepare for motherhood by reading baby books. I tried to ascertain if I wanted a child or not by reading novels with problematic mother-daughter relationships. I still think about Avni Doshi’s Booker Prize shortlisted debut a lot. In it, three generations of women – all of them mothering and abandoning each other in different ways – explore how the pressures of society has changed their agency. The ideas of art, ambivalence, mothering and how to juggle all three jostle among the heat and sweat and tastes of Pune, a city in western India. It is a brilliant book.

Matrescence by Lucy Jones

By contrast, I read Lucy Jones’ book 10 weeks postnatal and it ushered me into one of those matrescent breakthroughs that feel like you’ve previously been underwater. I love Lucy’s books; like her previous work, Finding Eden, Matrescence is meticulously researched and, admirably, into phenomena that have rarely been acknowledged by the traditional medical or scientific establishment because they largely affect women. Jones weaves this fascinating matter (when you conceive a foetus, their DNA changes that of the mother, in perpetuity, even if she does not go on to birth a living child) among her own experiences of having and raising three children. It made me feel more valid as a mother – so often the problem is not us, but the world in which we are expected to raise our children.

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

Which takes me neatly onto Rachel Yoder’s wry and searing novel. Nightbitch inspired a lot of attention last summer when the film adaptation was released, but what I loved about the novel was how it didn’t apologise for its leap into the fantastical or horrifying. Yoder’s protagonist, an artist who largely sacrifices her career to raise her son while her partner – the child’s father – takes extended work trips and spends his time gaming in a perfect portrayal of weaponised incompetence, deals with the injustice of modern motherhood by transforming nocturally into a dog. It sounds preposterous, but I find the proximity of the animal state strangely accurate here.

Mother Tongue by Jenni Nuttall

Medieval academic Jenni Nuttall died shortly after the release of this thoughtful, eye-opening book, which is both an etymology of womanhood and also a tender exploration of what it is to raise a daughter. So little space has been given to the experience of pregnancy, childbirth and child-raising. So much of it is so difficult to put into words. In Mother Tongue, by sifting through the centuries, Nuttall shows us the changing language regarding this act of creation and helps us question and contextualise what we have experienced.

‘Hark’ by Alice Vincent (Canongate, £18.99) is out now