Sunday book pick: In ‘Soldier Sailor’, the horrors of being a mother to your child (and husband)

A scene in Claire Kilroy’s novel Soldier Sailor looks something like this: young mothers have gathered at a local nursery with their toddlers for playtime. While each is busy keeping an eye on their ward, they get talking about the unnatural shapes of their babies’s skulls in their early days. Some are “flat heads” while others are “cone heads”. Total freaks of nature. One mother confesses how the shape of her baby’s head “really damaged” their first moments together. These are the dialogues that follow the confession:

“They should tell you that stuff to prepare you. Why don’t they tell women that stuff?”

“Would you have a baby if they told you that stuff?”

Most women probably wouldn’t. The frank conversation about the burdens and blemishes of motherhood is a critical absence that no amount of women’s liberation seems to have corrected. Motherhood is terrifying, yes, and yet, every woman is left to herself to discover just how terrifying and life-altering it can be. Childbirth might just be the easiest bit – because what follows is a never-ending cycle of exhaustion, negligence, and losing your sense of self.

A freelance mother

Written as a monologue to her baby Sailor, the mother – Soldier – tells him of their early days of togetherness. She...

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