Motherload

I found this absolutely brilliant potted history of marriage today, instead of writing my book on parenting... Ten key moments in the history of marriage What I love about this piece is that it is so specific about each era of marriage. In 10 simple steps, it shows the exact evolution from chattel to love match across nearly 2000 years of the institution, via the different edicts and statutes that first accommodated, then enshrined, social change. My sense of history is not nearly specific enough, because I stopped studying history at FOURTEEN. This is because, in my lovely, proper girls' school, we had to choose between history and geography at O level. Woe betide anyone who thought it might possibly be useful to go on studying both — gosh, it might take you over the decreed number of subjects ! Meanwhile the parallel boys' school merrily put its gilded youth in for French and maths early, got them on to O/A level, and let them do as many O levels as they enjoyed. Ah! The dif...

So, in November, I have signed up to the 'write a novel in a month' website ( http://www.nanowrimo.org/ ). This means I am aiming to write 50,000 words of my book on motherhood. I have already written reams and reams of words on motherhood, and done a lot of interview-based research. I get up every day at 6am (ok, sometimes I don't make it, but a lot of the time I get up). But I feel terrified, and unable to progress. During the day I go to work, write all day, in a very different style, and execute tasks. My checklists have become clean and ordered, they are accomplished checklists. In the evening, my time with the children has become contained and neat: a bedtime story and we're done. Occasionally, alone in the dark morning, I glimpse a future in which my battery-farmed children will emerge, pale-skinned, into the adult world, devoid of personal interests, utterly narrowminded, unable to cross a road by themselves, and in debt for the rest of their lives because I cou...

I came across the essay below by Zadie Smith in January's Prospect, and was blown away by it. What I love is that she is so honest about what she calls micromanagement of novel-writing, giving credibility to the model that privileges just feeling one's way, rather than knowing what the ending is. When I was working on my doctorate (which I'm afraid is still my point of reference for writing), I was told so often by people that it was better to know exactly where one was going. I could always make constructions for my phd, that neatly put in boxes what I was trying to say, but I could never be bothered to write into a box. I desperately wanted my phd to be a voyage of discovery, where even I would not know what I was unearthing until it appeared on the page in front of me. After all, it was a doctorate on Proust, who essentially did much the same thing. Zadie Smith still organizes her lecture into sections, but given what she says about dismantling scaffolding where one reco...