The Nursery
A Novel
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A "brilliant...essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood" (The New York Times) and the early postpartum days, following a woman struggling with maternal fear and its looming madness and showing how difficult and fragile those days can be—and how vital love is to pull anyone out from the dark
“A radical novel...I’m obsessed with this book.” —Jessamine Chan, New York Times bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers
There is the before and the after. Withering in the maternal prison of her apartment, a new mother finds herself spiraling into a state of complete disaffection. As a translator, she is usually happy to spend her days as the invisible interpreter. But now home alone with her newborn, she is ill at ease with this state of perpetual giving, carrying, feeding. The instinct to keep her baby safe conflicts with the intrusive thoughts of causing the baby harm, and she struggles to reclaim her identity just as it seems to dissolve from underneath her.
Feeling isolated from her supportive but ineffectual husband, she strikes up a tentative friendship with her ailing upstairs neighbour, Peter, who hushes the baby with his oxygen tank in tow. But they are both running out of time; something is soon to crack. Joyful early days of her pregnancy mingle with the anxious arrival of the baby, and culminate in a painful confrontation – mostly, between our narrator and herself. Striking and emotive, The Nursery documents the slow process of staggering back towards the simple pleasures of life and reentering the world after post-partum depression.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Molnar's entrancing debut captures the volatile inner life of a woman with postpartum depression. The narrator, a literary translator, feels isolated while caring for her baby girl, Button, and, as her days blur into each other, she has a hard time seeing herself as more than a "milk bar," and her mind frequently reverts to thoughts of hurting Button. Molnar braids the narrator's gloomy reflections on motherhood ("Women have done this before me and nothing changed. And women will do this after me") with accounts of visits from an elderly neighbor who is mourning the death of his wife, and interactions with her husband, John. In one of the most powerful passages, the narrator studies John and finds him completely unchanged while her body has been torn apart, her career put on hold, and her time fully dedicated to raising her daughter. Though it's unclear how some of the pieces are meant to fit, such as the visits from the neighbor, Molnar brings a cutting verisimilitude to her portrayal of the narrator's fuzzy state of mind, and she's equally unsparing with her vivid descriptions of childbirth, recovery, and the physical demands of early motherhood. It amounts to a powerful look at what a new mother endures.
