Motherload

"A MON TH!" This is the main reaction I received to the news that I was going away for a month to write a book (about motherhood, as it happens).  I couldn't work out whether it was men or women who were more likely to stare in incredulity. As if I was leaving my children on a frozen hillside, or having an affair with a well-known politician. Of course there were some people who got it (I think), who didn't react with a quickly-suppressed cough of scandal in their throats. These people said, “Go for it, just make it worthwhile, get that book written already! How brilliant that you've got a room of your own!” Of course it’s the doubtful  and silent  judgers I believe. Yes yes, it’s wrong to go, I should be safely at home, doing the washing, shopping for the endless routine of children’s teas, monitoring the activities, the homework, the notes home from school, the Forest Schools equipment, doing the Guides run, making inane conversation at drop off...

I set off into this book with a slight prickle about my person. It can get my goat when a book seems to trade in self-deprecating humour, especially when the author is a woman. What is being masked by the humour? So often it is self-loathing, as if the only legitimate entry into public discourse for the (female) speaker is self-negation. Why do women have to twist themselves into such knots in order to speak. Can't they just... Speak?  Perhaps How to be a Woman trades a little too much in this form of self-justification. But its approach to its subject is so unusual and riveting that it can be forgiven.  I have never seen a feminist account of womanhood written in such an irrepressible blend of first person memoir and self-help.  Caitlin Moran has a certain kind of passport past the customs officials guarding feminism precisely because she is not an Oxbridge-educated success story. Hers is a story of success against most people's odds: home-educated -- or rather an aut...