Black Milk
On the Conflicting Demands of Writing, Creativity, and Motherhood
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4.0 • 12 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An acclaimed Turkish novelist's personal account of balancing a writer's life with a mother's life.
After the birth of her first child in 2006, Turkish writer Elif Shafek suffered from postpartum depression that triggered a profound personal crisis. Infused with guilt, anxiety, and bewilderment about whether she could ever be a good mother, Shafak stopped writing and lost her faith in words altogether. In this elegantly written memoir, she retraces her journey from free-spirited, nomadic artist to dedicated by emotionally wrought mother. Identifying a constantly bickering harem of women who live inside of her, each with her own characteristics-the cynical intellectual, the goal-oriented go-getter, the practical-rational, the spiritual, the maternal, and the lustful-she craves harmony, or at least a unifying identity. As she intersperses her own experience with the lives of prominent authors such as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Ayn Rand, and Zelda Fitzgerald, Shafak looks for a solution to the inherent conflict between artistic creation and responsible parenting.
With searing emotional honesty and an incisive examination of cultural mores within patriarchal societies, Shafak has rendered an important work about literature, motherhood, and spiritual well-being.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Feeling conflicted about embarking on motherhood, Turkish novelist Shafak (The Forty Rules of Love) chronicles the cruel, crazy trajectory that took her from feminist single novelist to married nursing mother of two. An accomplished writer by her mid-30s, Shafak faced the eternal dilemma of most enlightened women: can she pursue her cherished work, be true to herself, and also be a selfless caregiver to children? An interview with a legendary Turkish novelist, Adalet Agaoglu, challenged Shafak to face her irresolution, resulting in a virtual civil war amid the discordant voices in her own conscience the pint-sized Thumbelinas, she calls them, her own "mini harem" which each try to dictate literally what she ought to do: e.g., Little Miss Practical organizes the hiring of her nanny, secretary, and assistant; Dame Dervish attends to her spiritual self; Miss Ambitious Chekhovian tells her to forget about babies, write better novels, and develop her skill; while Miss Highbrowed Cynic warns her that, having children or not, she will always regret the path she didn't take. Shafak gets the modern woman's despair, and especially enlightening are her renderings of the lives of (mostly English-language) women writers she admires: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, George Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald. Shafak's stint as a resident at Mount Holyoke College and elsewhere has transformed her into a truly Western feminist voice within a region of engrained patriarchy: she is clear-eyed, savvy, unrepentant.
