Motherload

Having spent my time recently haring about to interview men and women for the book I'm working on, I felt like sitting back with a glass of wine and some good TV the other night. I had taped the current series running on BBC4 entitled Women , and lo and behold, our Lovefilm account spat Enchanted through our letterbox. I ended up glutting on a programme about who really does the UK's domestic work, followed swiftly by Enchanted , Disney's deconstruction of the very figure it has itself created: the cartoon version of the fairytale princess. The Women doc was about how men and women divide up domestic labour, and whether it has become equally shared -- posited as 'one of feminism's central goals' (I'm not sure it really was a goal, more an object of critique). Enchanted is about how A. N. Fairytale Heroine comes to question her faith in the ideal of 'Happy Ever After With A Prince'. She learns to value reason, and to listen to her own emotions, ra...

A Good Childhood is a report for the Children's Society. I'd never heard of it, but my husband got it for work. I think he was in part inspired to buy it by the terrible UN report back in around 2006, which put the UK at the bottom of the heap for good places to raise kids. The report's been put together by Richard Layard and Judy Dunn, although they are really only the final adjusters, synthesizing an absolutely huge amount of research, that has been done on the state of childhood and all that contributes to it (ie the whole of British society, saturated in consumerist capitalist ideology). Richard Layard is the economist who wrote Happiness , and the report is written in a delightful avuncular style, which just makes my heart melt. It's very tough: we hear about the dreadful state of the UK education system, about mental ill-health in children and young people, and the terrible impact of consumerism, substance abuse, violent games, and overworked parents. Yet because ...

Mommy Wars (edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner (Random House, 2006)) is billed as a ‘face-off’ between ‘career’ and ‘stay-at-home moms’. My heart began to sink immediately. Another attack on women, another simplistic polarization of the choices women make and the choices that are open to them once they have children. In fact, however, this collection of essays isn’t nearly as bad as its own cover makes it sound. It’s not a ‘face-off’ at all, but a collection of essays about motherhood written by highly literate women, many of them already well-established writers and journalists. I really enjoyed the experience of reading about so many women’s lives (even though I had a guilty twinge at the realization that pretty much all of them exactly shared my profile, so that all that was really going on was a huge moan-fest). Some essays have clearly been taken from other sources and re-published for the purposes of this book. In that sense there is an element of professional performance here: man...

In Ransom , David Malouf has taken an episode recounted in the Iliad , and investigated it to find its inner workings. It is a moment of suspense and inaction, in which war has petered out because of a failure of mourning, on both sides. A father’s desire to honour his dead son is pitted against a man’s desire to avenge the death of his best friend, and stalemate has ensued. Hector, King Priam’s son, has been killed by Achilles, the Greek warrior and leader of the Myrmidons. This is in reprisal for Hector’s killing of Patroclus, Achilles’ best friend. Achilles has dishonoured Hector’s body by dragging it behind a chariot up and down in front of the walls of Troy for twelve days, in front of the horrified Priam and Queen Hecuba. He has refused to return the body for proper burial. War is suspended while Achilles, maddened by grief, cannot abandon Hector’s body or grieve for Patroclus. Neither side, in fact, can begin the grieving process: on Priam’s side because the symbol of death, th...

Legend of a Suicide is an astonishing set of short stories and a novella by David Vann (Penguin, 2008). It would be hard to call it a novel, although all the stories revolve around the same theme: suicide (oddly enough). David Vann comes from Alaska, which is an odd enough country to be from in the first place. It’s a little like coming from Iceland, where it’s practically obligatory to be a craftsman or woman, in some line of creative endeavour, whether making clothes or jewellery or Nordic myths. Seemingly everyone worth their salt in Alaska is a huntsman and carpenter, filling their homes with handmade tables and beds, and covering their floors with furs. But Vann’s personal history makes simply coming from Alaska pale into insignificance. Here is a man whose father went out and had affairs, divorced his mother, divorced his stepmother, had more affairs, failed as a dentist, a woodsman and a fisherman, and then shot himself. You can’t trust that all the facts about Vann’s life that...

Isn't it amazing what you can get even out of trashy films? Exhausted last night after a full day spent doing nothing very much, I curled up with the television, and surfed till I hit paydirt: Ice Princess . Picture the scene (but don't ask why I secretly love teenage slush like this). A young girl wants to follow her dream and become an ice dancer. Her mother is a dowdy academic, and dreams of her daughter going to Harvard to study physics. Our heroine practises by herself, out on the frozen pond behind her house, and hopes and prays quietly. Another mother, blonde-haired ex-ice dancer, trains her own daughter to compete at the highest level. She is the original ice queen, glamorous and beautiful, ruthless in her competitiveness, and determined that her daughter will win... at any price. She carries a dark secret from her own competing days.... Of course she does. Eventually this opposition comes into conflict: the two mothers go head to head for their daughters' achieveme...

In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2008), is a book I bought for my foodie ex-chef husband for Christmas, but in fact he was too preoccupied with The Wire , and The Road (apparently only able to digest manly nominalized materials, where I need that feminized genitive connection). So I read it. Pollan's argument is that we (for 'we', he means Americans, but it's the 'we' of the Western diet) are being fed an enormous amount of calories deriving from a small group of less than nutritious things -- soy, corn, wheat -- all dressed up as an Aladdin's cave of food-like products. We should, so his antidote goes, be hunting and gathering a vast array of plant foods that have a deeply simple relationship with the land they grew on. We are, thus, to invert the relationship between mono- and multicultural that has been foisted upon us, and are ourselves to seek out diversity from origins that are simple, rather than consuming what is frighteningly simplif...