Some Writing About Women news: I’ve made a podcast !!! It’s called Woman, Interrupted. In many ways, it’s an extension of this newsletter: a series of conversations on where creativity, ambition, and identity meet motherhood. As regular WAW readers will know, for the last couple of years I’ve been stuck on one (wholly unoriginal) question: How the fuck do we marry the magic, madness and mundanity of motherhood with pursuing a career, feeling creatively fulfilled and maintaining a sense of selfhood? But now, instead of my typo-filled stream of consciousness, I’ve spoken to three very cool women. It’s a DIY project from my basement, and it’s been both a labour of love and a crisis of confidence writ large. It took me a long time to make because I really wanted to make it and I really didn’t think I could. But I’ll tell you more about that later.
The greatest joy of my career to date has been having the privilege to ask women about their lives. And that’s what I did here. I wanted to talk women I admire, who have done brilliant work while also being mothers, and I wanted to know how they are doing it. What are their secrets and sacrifices? How do they feel at the end of each day? What’s changed? What’s stayed the same? What’s the hardest thing, the best thing? I wanted to know if they felt like I have over the last 2.5 years.
Luckily, three excellent women agreed to talk to me.
Lucy Jones, journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Matrescence. I really don’t think it’s an exaggeration to describe Matrascene as the most important book on motherhood since Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, which was published 20 years ago.
Alice Vincent, the bestselling author and journalist who found big success when she quit her full-time job, went freelance and had a baby.
Naomi Sheldon, a theatre and TV writer and actor who became the family breadwinner when raising newborn twins during the pandemic.
All three women are extremely impressive, but they are also candid, honest and speak with great vulnerability about their experiences. Their experiences are very different but there’s a thread that runs through them all; it’s one of compromise and challenge and roadblocks and discrimination. It’s one of not knowing how things will turn out. It’s one of testing their mettle and examining who they are. It’s one of trusting instincts, discovery and rediscovery. It’s one of staggering committment to the things in life they value. It’s a steady forward movement - even if it doesn’t always feel that way.
I took a tremendous amount from each conversation and hope you will too.
But, really, why? Because I know, and you know, the world does not need another podcast.
In many ways, I simply felt compelled. I still feel the urge to wrestle with the ideas and questions caught up in the tangle of motherhood - and perhaps always will. But also because I think I needed to take stock of the earliest days of motherood. The version that is so achingly lonely. The hours spent walking around a park. The hours awake in the night when your partner is sleeping. The profound sense of detachment, disorientation, the anxiety, the terror that something essential about yourself has gone. A podcast like this would have been a lifeline when I was that mother, doing laps around a park with a 4-month-old strapped to my chest, buying a coffee I didn’t want because sometimes that was my only adult interaction all day. I truly hope these conversations can offer the comfort and reassurance to others that I so desperately needed. But I also hope their usefullness extends far beyond those with newborns. I had these conversations as a mother of a toddler and found them extremley helpful. I hope, in time, to talk to mothers of older children, too. After all, I hear the conondrum of motherhood and creativity is an ongoing one…
And, as much as these conversations are for other women, they are also for me. They are for the version of me with unwashed hair and eyes stained red for reasons I could never quite articulate - a version that still appears more often than I’d like to admit. They are for the version of me who felt like she was having out-of-body experiences at baby groups, terrified she’d never have an intelligent conversation again. They are the version of me who’s heart shattered when I left my son with a childminder but felt dizzy from the rush of freedom. They are for the version of me today who is watching the clock for nusery pick-up, still figuring out how ambition fits around teatime. I’ve made these podcasts for every version of myself that doubted she’d ever be writing these words, introducing a new creative project.
I knew that I wanted to have these conversations but actually doing it has been a whole other thing. I’d start only to immediately stop. Sometimes because of work/life commitments, but mostly because my self-doubt was chronic, at times, paralysing. This podcast was a crisis of confidence staring me in the face every day from my laptop. The daily retorts in my head got louder and louder: You’re too late to start a podcast, how embarrassing. Everything about motherhood has already been said, how embarrassing. Nobody will want to be a guest because you don’t have any subscribers, how embarrassing. This chorus always been there, but with motherhood, it has become deafening. Yet, somehow, I sent out interview requests and each time I recieved a ‘yes’ back, it felt like a light being turned on. I then let the recorded interviews sit on my desktop for months on end while I tried to talk myself out of publishing them.
Somewhere along the line, self-doubt has infected my bloodstream. As I get older, I realise the task is not to try to eradicate it because that’s not possible. The task is to learn how to do all the things anyway. For this project, I managed to turn down the doubt by thinking of that version of me, two years ago. The fragile and frightened first-time mum. By publishing these podcasts, I’m proving to her that she will come back to herself. And yes, it might take a while. And no, my podcast isn't going to sell out the Sydney Opera House. But I’ve created work I believe in, in the service of other women, and surely that’s a success in it’s own right? Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to tell the voice in my head who has been trained to chase numbers and noise. As I send these conversations out into the world, as A turns two and a half, I want nothing more than to sit out in the garden with all the versions of me that have arrived since a snowy day in November 2022, pour them all a glass of wine, and say: we fucking did it.
We’ll start with my conversation with Lucy Jones (you can hear at the top of this email). I’m evangelical about Lucy’s book and truly believe her research is foundational to any conversations on motherhood. In this episode, we talk about identity after motherhood, reassembling ourselves, a world hostile to parenting, changing brains and cells, and how the radical transformation of matrescence can, eventually, bring ourselves closer to who we really are.
Please bear with the slightly homemade sound. Editing is hard! I will release one weekly via my substack, and the episodes are long because, as every mother knows, the days, and the nights, are also long. You can also listen to them on Apple and Spotify. If you enjoy, please hit like, review and share. If you would like to support me in making more of these conversations, you can via Ko-fi or hit the pledge button.
Finally, this is for all of the women who feel, one way or another, interrupted.
On with the show,
Marisa x
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