Inferno
A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
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'A beautifully written account of postpartum psychosis, and the ties, blessings and burdens of family' - NIGELLA LAWSON
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE
*Observer Book of the Week*
*A Guardian Memoir of the Year 2020*
*Harper's Bazaar 10 Women Who Will Shape What You Watch, See and Read in 2020*
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'Striking and original' - Cathy Rentzenbrink, The Times
'Completely devastating. Completely heartbreaking' - Daisy Johnson
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Catherine Cho's son was three months old when she and her husband left home to introduce him to their families.
Catherine herself could never have envisaged how the trip would end for her - surfacing in an involuntary psychiatric ward, separated from her husband and child, unable to understand who she was, or remember how she got there.
In her two weeks on the ward, Catherine turned to her notebook to reconstruct who she was, piece by piece, from the fragments of her life as they drifted back to her. The result is this powerful exploration of psychosis and motherhood, at once intensely personal, yet holding within it a universal experience - of how we love, live and understand ourselves in relation to each other.
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'A haunting, eloquent evocation of becoming a stranger to yourself' Observer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an eerie, unsettling debut memoir about postpartum psychosis, Cho delves into her 2018 breakdown after the birth of her son, Cato. Cho started showing signs of distress when she and her husband, James, traveled from their home in London to visit James's parents in New Jersey and threw Cato a traditional Korean party to mark his 100 days of life. As James's overbearing parents questioned Cho about Cato ("Why wasn't he rolling yet?"), Cho began losing her grip: she started suspecting she was under surveillance, her son suddenly appeared to have "flashing red pupils," and she heard voices telling her, "Your son needs to die." Soon, Cho was involuntarily committed to a psych ward by doctors, where she bobbed in and out of lucidity, tore at her clothes, and saw demons during her 12 days there. The author spends little time on the science behind postpartum psychosis ("the reasons for postpartum psychosis aren't fully understood"), and punctuates her story with discussions of Korean culture and the pressure Korean families place on mothers and wives to be accommodating; her narrative culminates with Cho getting medicated, then tentatively reestablishing a physical bond with her son and accepting him as her own ("I remembered him... I was a mother again"). This piercing narrative about motherhood and a fraying human mind will slowly and creepily pull the reader in and leave a chill.
