On Motherhood and the Literary Life
Emily Hodgson Anderson
When Doris Lessing decided she wanted to be a great writer, she left two of her children far behind. Mother of three, soon to be author of her magnum opus, The Golden Notebook (1962), she abandoned a son and daughter with her first husband in what was then Rhodesia and made her way to London to write. She returns frequently in writing to her motivations for this decision. Referring to “the housewife’s disease,” the domestic and emotional labor that falls excessively to women, and particularly to women who are mothers, she laments this experience as what the writer-as-mother must endure—her mind constantly electrified, her neurons flailing and overfilled. To find a cure for this disease, I’d always heard, Lessing trades in being a mother for her art.
The true story is a bit more complex. She arrived in London in 1949 with the son from her second marriage, and he would live with her until he died. The writer Jenny Diski, as a troubled teenager, also moved in with Lessing for a time in 1963. Lessing wasn’t what I’d call a traditionally nurturing mother. When Diski confessed to Lessing that she was suffering from depression, for example, the “emotional blackmail” of this confession so angered Lessing that she stormed out of the house. But she did juggle writing with relationships and mothering, of a sort.
In my case, I wanted to be a good writer and a good mother.
In my case, I wanted to be a good writer and a good mother. (I didn’t want to be a single mother, though that’s what I became.) Somewhat paradoxically, I tried to write a book about being both.
There is no one right way, I tell myself, to be a mother. There is no one right way, I tell myself, to write. I repeat these mantras regularly perhaps because I don’t fully believe them, and I hope, by repeating them, to make them true. The British physician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott reassures me that a good mother is simply “good enough.” Being a good writer, I tell my students, also involves being “good enough.” If you wait around for perfection, you’ll never set pen to page.
Still, in both cases, I know, there are better and worse versions of both roles.
For example, the critic Claire Dederer, en route to examining her own struggles with the balance between writing and mothering, reflects on Lessing and what she calls the selfishness that devoted writing entails. Mothering pulls away from the writer’s focus, Dederer opines; this pull is the handicap of writing mothers, the non-level-playing field on which they try to balance their desks and notepads and computers and pens. Yet if mothering pulls away from writing focus, making one a less-good writer, does writing pull away from mothering? The grown-up daughter of one of my prominent writer friends reflected to me that the concentration required by a writer isn’t often easy on her children. To be a “good-enough” writer might mean, as in the case of Lessing, being a subpar mom.
To be a “good-enough” writer might mean, as in the case of Lessing, being a subpar mom.
Tillie Olsen, in her seminal work on the various “silences” experienced by women artists, synthesizes the meditations of multiple women writers, some with children, some without, who reflect on this same bind. (How) can one be a writer and a mother? Or, maybe a better version of the question is: If one desires to be a mother, (how) can one be a writer, too?
When it came time for me to finalize the title of my book, I experienced a moment of authorial doubt. Naming is hard for me, and my first son went unnamed for over twenty-four hours. In an inverse though similar predicament, I’d known my book for years by its working title—“Shadow Work,” followed by some permutation of “Loneliness and the Writing Life”—but now, at the almost-moment of its appearance, I couldn’t decide if that title still accurately described what had for years been growing inside my brain. Significantly, I went back and forth with my (unfailingly helpful) editor on whether or not I should ditch the main title, keep the subtitle, and add “motherhood” to its name. If I did: I’d shine a light on an identity that was important to me, the book, and possibly a specific demographic of loyal readers. If I did: that light might threaten to outshine all other aspects of me, my loneliness, my love of reading and writing, and my book.
Motherhood can be and feel so all-encompassing. It can be so defining that it may deter other readers, who may not be mothers, from finding within my experience some common ground. But it can also, I believe, be and feel like only one aspect of a long and varied literary life. Motherhood can be something that feeds my heart and mind in private, something that supplements rather than steals from my public-facing work. Motherhood, I believe—contra Lessing—is just one of many things that makes me a better writer, and being a writer makes me a “good enough” mom.
And so I left it out of the title, in the shadows. But I feel it everywhere: in the text, subtext, and paratext of my book.
Emily Hodgson Anderson is professor of English and Dornsife College Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Shadow Work: Loneliness and the Literary Life.
