Welcome to Your New Life
April 2013
Anna Goldsworthy / Black Inc.
To become a mother is to enter a state of intense dissolution: of corporeality, of identity, of philosophy. Pregnancy morphs the body into a physical other and after birth the child’s presence imprints itself onto the psyche. And yet, mothers are neither part of a homogenous mass, nor are they singular entities. Whilst motherhood is a strong vein of consciousness that runs through all societies, dominant discourses tend to be either glib and inane or, increasingly and joylessly, authoritarian.
So we can only welcome the arrival of Anna Goldsworthy’s early motherhood memoir. Already a classical pianist, she proved herself a lively memoirist in Piano Lessons, a narration of her passage through musical interpretation and artistry. Welcome to Your New Life’s focus begins with the body, its fluctuations between animality and sentience, until the writer is catapulted into the topsy-turvy world of parenthood so arrestingly evoked by the book’s cover. Her earlier book’s tone was of wry self-deprecation, a worthy weapon to ward off the tiresome demons too often associated with the genre: navel-gazing and sentimentality. Here her disassembly is more absolute. She lays out her weaknesses as if in a specimen cupboard but they are transformed and emancipated by language and humour. She has an exquisite ability to recast the banal into another sphere.
Goldsworthy is a woman sometimes plagued by anxieties and with a propensity to catastrophise. The sleep deprivation of early motherhood and the fragility of a newborn baby threaten to undo her. On holidays, the gossamer fine membrane separating sanity from madness proves itself to be permeable. For yes, her thinking – that her husband may mistakenly drop their baby down a composting toilet – is madness but the circumstances in which such theories are fomented are those that propel many women into postnatal depression whilst others experience these cataclysmic episodes momentarily but are left with memories that pull like scar tissue.
Alongside grand narratives of family and love, Goldsworthy manages to be outrageously funny. Whilst countless works of literary beauty might cause me to weep, there are few books that have made me howl with laughter as this one has. It appears that the more educated or affluent we become, the more flagrant is our disregard for common sense. In observing the never-ending cycle of parental judgement, the writer cannot but partake in it herself and ultimately no one is spared. As for the moments when we espy versions of ourselves, all seemingly deluded that we are rearing future Nobel Peace Prize winners, there is something liberating in this laughter of recognition.
At one point Goldsworthy congratulates herself on maintaining her humour, somewhat ironically as her knowledge of what is to come belies this blitheness. It is a moment that elucidates what sets this book apart, for sometimes laughter is painfully begot. All expectant mothers ought to be armed with this book; its questioning of the imposed morality of childrearing makes it a deliciously subversive read.
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