The Best Most Awful Job Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood edited by Katherine May #Review

 With Mother's Day in the UK set for March 22nd, it seems totally appropriate to be featuring a collection of musings on Motherhood by 20 writers. The Best Most Awful Job is published today by Elliot and Thompson.

What does it mean to be a mother?

Twenty writers speak out in this searingly honest, diverse and powerful collection.

Motherhood is life-changing. Disorientating, overwhelming, intense on every level, it can leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself. Yet despite more women speaking out in recent years about the reality of their experiences – good, bad and in between – all too often it’s the same stories getting told, while key parts of the maternal experience still remain unspeakable and unseen. There are a million different ways to be a mother, yet the vision we see in books, on screen and online overwhelmingly fails to represent this commonplace yet extraordinary experience for most of us. It’s time to broaden the conversation.

The Best, Most Awful Job is a deeply personal collection about motherhood in all its raw, heart-wrenching, gloriously impossible forms. Overturning assumptions, breaking down myths, shattering stereotypes, it challenges perceptions of what it means to be a mother.

Pulsating with energy and emotion, and covering deeply personal stories The Best, Most Awful Job brings together a diverse range of bold and brilliant writers and asks you to listen.

Some highlights include:

• Hollie McNish on her trademark outspoken and sane form

• Josie George writing beautifully and carefully about mothering yourself and your child when your body won’t play ball

• Michelle Adams on meeting your adoptive child and learning to be a mother

• Peggy Riley on the lost heartbeat of a deeply yearned-for child

• Mimi Aye on the pain of her children being seen as ‘other’ in their own country

• Leah Hazard - practising midwife and author of Hard Pushed - on the scars our bodies hold as mothers...

Stories also cover: being unable to conceive, step-parenting, losing a child, single parenthood, being an autistic mother, being a reluctant home-schooler and the many ways in which race, class, disability, religion and sexuality affect Motherhood.

My Thoughts

This is such an effective book to read as you dip in and out of the anthology. You are presented with a range of voices and styles which illuminate different women's thoughts and feelings about Motherhood. Women are of all ages and at different stages in the relationship of parent and child.

    Most memorable to me was the account by Michelle Adams as she recounted meeting her adopted daughter for the first time and describing the bond she felt. The reactions of others, such as when they asked where her 'real' mother was or made intrusive comments, fed into her insecurities as to whether she was in fact a 'real' mother. It was her daughter's instinctive reaction after surgery which showed her that she was. 

    Some of the accounts are touching, others a little bit shocking. Saima Mir talks about her hidden maternal rage and the feeling that as a mother, she has become 'invisible'.  The cost to her career, she feels, is a price that her husband does not have to pay. Katherine May calls her anthology 'a snapshot of reality' which features so many different voices which all show that Motherhood encompasses the best and the worst of experience at the same time. It is a complex picture- pretty much like Motherhood, I would say. 

In short: An honest and emotional look at Motherhood
 

About the Editor

Katherine May is an author of fiction and memoir whose most recent works have shown a willingness to deal frankly with the more ambiguous aspects of parenting. In The Electricity of Every Living Thing she explored the challenges – and joys – of being an autistic mother, and sparked a debate about the right of mothers to ask for solitude. In the forthcoming Wintering, she looks at the ways in which parenting can lead to periods of isolation and stress. She lives with her husband and son in Whitstable, Kent.

You can follow Katherine here: Website  |  Twitter   |  Instagram 

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Book link: Amazon UK 

Thanks to Katherine May, Elliott and Thompson and Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for a copy of the book and a place on the tour. 

                                                              Follow the rest of the tour!