Why Are All the Mommy Memoirs So White?
By sTACY LEE KONG
Image: Geoffrey Cole
When I saw that two of my favourite writers—Chantal Braganza and Bee Quammie—were both publishing books about motherhood on the very same day, I knew I wanted to talk to them together. I couldn’t think of a better duo to dig into how we tend to think and talk about motherhood in pop culture and media, why it’s so often through a white, colonial lens—and how their books disrupt that framework. Both Story of Your Mother (by Chantal) and The Book of Possibilities (by Bee) are must reads, of course, but I hope you also enjoy reading this conversation, where they brought really great insights into the types of motherhood narratives that are considered literary, what that can tell us about how we perceive mothers in real life and what’s—or rather, who’s—missing from the mommy memoir genre.
Before you started writing your own books, what was your perception of this kind of memoir, and the wider canon of personal writing about motherhood?
Bee: I think for me, one of the things that always gave me a bit of pause—and this is not about anyone's specific memoir at all, but just the way that these stories are generally told—was that I was very sensitive to the idea of, how do you tell a story about motherhood involving children, but the children are not able to really speak to how they show up in your story? This is the reverse, but I was just thinking about Jennette McCurdy’s book, I’m Glad My Mom Died. I haven't read it yet, but I have seen people being aghast, like, ‘How can you write like that? How can you say these things?’ But she had to be honest to her story. I think when we're looking at it from the reverse, you [also] need to be honest with your story, but how do you do that in a way that still honours the stories of the other people who are involved?
Bee Quammie
I don't know if there's any specific way to get that right, because everybody's different, but that's something that I always thought about in terms of these motherhood memoirs, or even the mommy blogs and the family vloggers. And it's a bit of a rhetorical question, because I think as a writer, you just have to write your way through it and maybe hope for the best. But that was always one of the things that stuck out to me.
It's almost a double power dynamic, because as a writer, you have the power because you're the one telling the story. But parenting inherently has a power dynamic, too. Chantal, how did you perceive these types of books before you started writing your own?
Chantal: 2015, 2016, 2017—the years that I was pregnant and newly a mom—were in the middle of this decade where a lot of memoirs were being sold as the ‘new literary motherhood.’ Like, no one has ever written about motherhood before, apparently, and no one’s ever taken it seriously as a philosophical question, and that's what these books are [doing]. At the time, I was like, ‘Please, I want to read, give me give me more.’ But it became pretty clear pretty quickly that there was a pattern in the way that they were being sold, and a recurrent theme. Generally, the books that got this kind of treatment, the books we discuss[ed] as having literary merit, were very white, even in the aesthetics of how they were being written.
Eventually, when you start either reading more or just getting further down the line of experiencing motherhood yourself, it becomes very apparent that’s not true. You read enough, and you realize that as long as people have been able to talk about their own version of anything that, of course, someone has been talking about what it's like to be a mother for them, because that is an experience that predates literally anything. So, if there is a written record of something, there is someone talking about their experience of being a mother.
I’m interested in why motherhood became a marketable idea at that moment in time. There has [also] been a proliferation of motherhood memoirs since then, so at this point, when we talk about motherhood as a literary subject, it's more interesting to me to think about how it connects to other things.
Chantal Braganza (Image: Geoffrey Cole)
I realized as you both were speaking that I’ve also been thinking about motherhood memoirs in the same universe as, and sometimes in comparison to, the different eras of mommy blogging, which was at first very warmly inspirational and then very, very brutally honest. A lot of those motherhood memoirs are in that space—like, the thing that makes them feel ‘literary’ or ‘important’ is the grittiness, the physicality, the solitude. But that is also a particular experience of motherhood. Obviously it’s important to be honest about the parts where it's difficult, but there’s also an experience of motherhood that is community-driven, right? I’m thinking about all of the people who helped raise me. Or now as an adult, I'm not a mom, but I am part of a community of aunties.
Bee: The whole individualized aspect of how motherhood has often been written about feeds this idea of there only being one way to be a mom. My seven-year-old wants to be my mini-me in everything, so she's always talked about ‘When I'm a mommy this, when I’m a mommy that.’ Just the other night, she said, “Mommy, when I have kids, how many kids do you want me to have?” I was like, “Girl, it's not my business!” I wrote about this in the book, because right now she wants to be a mom, but who knows what life might bring for her. Maybe health-wise, she might not be able to carry a child, maybe financially, maybe she just changes her mind when she's older. Who knows what's going to happen. But she has this innate ability to nurture, so she'll be able to be a mother to somebody if she chooses to, whether she births them or not.
I find when I'm thinking about the more individualistic stories of motherhood, [they imply] this is the only way to be a mom. You have to get pregnant and birth this baby and deal with the dirty diapers, and the incompetent husband who doesn't know how to change a diaper, and the stress of doing it all alone. When people start reading that, they might feel like, ‘Okay, so that's the only way to do motherhood. That’s very bleak.’ When it comes to writing about motherhood, you do have to be honest about the challenges, about the hard days, all of that kind of stuff. But sometimes I read things and I'm like, do you like your kids?
Another thing about the way we write about motherhood in the West is, it’s not just very white, it's also very Anglo. Chantal, language is such a big part of your book, and your mothering. The Walrus published a really beautiful excerpt (that yes, definitely made me cry) about how our language shapes the way that we can experience things, and what it means to raise kids in a different language than the one you grew up speaking. Did you always know that would be part of your book?
Chantal: It was always going to be the case. My mom's village was her family, and they were very heavily involved in caring for my brother and me when we were young children. So we both grew up relatively fluent in Spanish, and I know that structurally, that's not going to be possible for my kids. And that was always going to be the case, so I was always going to write about it.
I don't know if language can shape the nature of your parenting, but I do think about the experience of not being able to translate your own experience of childhood for your children. I'm never going to get that across to my kids, but I can try, and this book is a version of that.
Okay, I have kind of a big-picture philosophical question for each of you about the framing of your books. So Chantal, the blurb for The Story of Your Mother starts with the question of, What if we considered motherhood as an organizing principle instead of a genre or subject? What does it mean for you to think of motherhood as an organizing principle as opposed to a genre or a subject?
Chantal: The book is still a book about motherhood. There's no getting away from that. I think one of the reasons it ended up taking me so long to finish this book is when I started, I was like, I'm writing a book about motherhood, but what does it mean to write a book about motherhood? Are there problems with that? How do I untangle those knots? And then I ended up still writing a book about motherhood! But at least it’s premised on the question of, if you think about motherhood as an identity alone, which I think a lot of marketing of motherhood narratives are based on, there are limitations to that. If you shift to mother is a verb—it's something that you do [and] it's a facet of who you are, you get closer to it. But writing a lot of this through like high pandemic times, having my second child at that time [and] seeing very clearly on a global scale just what happens when our care network is completely gone, you can't just think about motherhood as something that you do. So then where else is there left to go, if it's not one or the other? And I think it's more useful for me now to think about it as, when we think about motherhood, who do we consider the people who mother? Who are they? Who's left in, who's left out? I think in a lot of ways, our assumptions about those things structure the way that the world works. So, how are the people who mother supported, and how are they not supported, and in what ways do those things need to change?
Bee: Talking about writing about motherhood is making me think about the act itself, and how art reflects life, and vice versa. Like, some people think there's a time limit. There’s the idea that once you're 18, you're out of the house, you're doing your own thing. Or, the idea that I don't need to like you as a person, because I love you, and love means I put a roof over your head, and I buy clothes for you, and I buy food. And love from a child is obeyance, and that's how you show that you love me—by listening to me. It's reflecting so many things that are connected to how a lot of people talk and write about motherhood, and how we see it actually play out in life. And what makes other stories of motherhood so different, not just in the way they're written, but in terms of how they reflect a different way of looking at that relationship, and the fact that it doesn't stop once your kid turns 18, it keeps going, and all those different types of things.
I remember I wrote something about apologizing to my kids and one of the people who read it early to give a blurb was like, “I just realized I've never gotten an apology from my mom.” Even when she's done something that she needs to apologize for, it's like, we'll just smooth it over. I'll bring you cut up fruit in your room and that'll be my apology, but I'm not actually going to say the words. So, as we're talking about the writing of it, I was thinking about how that seems to reflect the way people actually just generally view that work and that relationship.
Okay, so this nicely segues into what I wanted to ask you about, Bee, because The Book of Possibilities feels, to me, like a rejection of two things, and I'm curious if this resonates with you. So one, a rejection of motherhood as this position of inherent expertise. Throughout the book, there's a discovering that I really appreciate, and that really resonates with me. I’m 40 years old, and I feel like I know less than I did when I was 20, and that's not very reassuring. So the idea that you could learn to be a mother, that you don't have to just know, is really interesting to me. But there's this other part of it, and I don’t know that this is intentional, but in the way that you are writing, it also feels like a rejection of this Western societal idea of Black women in particular as the guides to a morality or enlightenment or something. The way you write about discovering how to be a mother as you mother also feels like a rejection of that. And I'm curious if those things resonate with you, or if they were even like in your mind as you were writing?
They definitely resonate. I will say, your first point was something that I was thinking intentionally about as I was writing, because I've never had a 10-year-old before. Now I have one, and I'm going to master a 10-year-old, and then she's going to be 11, and I'm going to be like, ‘What the hell is this?!’ And having two kids doesn't help, because they're very different. I feel like I'm constantly starting over, constantly learning new things, constantly acquiring new skills in in being their mom and I wanted that to come across. This is just a continuous discovery, and it's a relationship. It's not just me discovering how to mother them, they're feeding into this relationship, and they're feeding into my learning process and my journey as well.
To your other point about the rejection of the Black woman as a guide, I don't think I was as intentional in thinking about that, but I'm glad you said it, because I feel like that's something I've been wrestling with in different ways, especially since becoming a mom. People always think, once you become a mom—and especially as a Black woman—that you're a mother [which means] you carry yourself a certain way, and you reject certain things. So I'm at day parties, and people are like, “Oh, my God, you're out!” Yeah, I'm out. I don't need to be home with the baby. Or playing mas. “Oh, as a mom, should you…” I'm like, “Did I die?!” So, that's something that I've always rejected, and I think I've really tried to poke at that sometimes and do things that people think you're not supposed to do that as a mother. And I'm going to do it with my kids right beside me!
I think where it is intentional is my overarching thing about not really liking the title of ‘role model’ because of the expectations, and instead being a possibility model. I don't want to be responsible for anybody except the people who I chose to bring here and be responsible for. Everything else is way too much pressure for me. And if you take something from whatever I'm doing, I love it, but don't look at me and be disappointed when I don't live up to your expectations, because I never agreed to be that person.
That’s one thing I really liked about the way you both framed your books. Because there's a social contract around motherhood in the West, particularly in North America, that you both kind of reject. And none of us actually agreed to that social contract, it just was imposed upon us exactly. So for you both to be creating a document and a physical thing that rejects that is really interesting, and important to have. Is there anything we didn’t talk about that you wanted to mention?
Bee: There’s just one more thing I want to add. When I think about the hidden inspiration or hidden audience for this book, I was actually thinking about women from older generations in my family. I don't talk about this in the book, but I talk about it in life: my marriage ended because of infidelity and a child that came out of it, and this is a very similar story for other marriages in my family. But what I found with some of the women affected is that they went with the social contract. To varying degrees—my mom ended up divorcing my dad, which some people were like, ‘Oh my god, what are you going to do now?’—but [largely, they] went along with this social contract of, "This is what I'm dealing with as a woman, but as a mother, this [staying in the marriage] is what I need to do." So, as much as I was thinking about my daughters when I was writing the book, I was also thinking about them, and writing it for the versions of them that wish they could have done something different. Maybe there's a part in my story that resonates, because that's what they would have done if they were able to break that contract. Maybe there's a part in my story that resonates with them, because that's what they would have done if they were able to, if they were able to break that contract.
Chantal: We talked about this a little bit earlier, about how there’s a lot of the praise around gritty, honest narratives about how hard motherhood is. It seems like you either have either that option or what we're seeing now happening with tradwife content, where it's like, ‘What are you talking about? This is the best thing I've ever done in my life, and I couldn't imagine being anything else.’ So, at this moment in time when those are two paths for talking about motherhood, it feels particularly important to complicate it.
Story of Your Mother by Chantal Braganza and The Book of Possibilities by Bee Quammie are on sale now.
✨ Out Now: Take It to the Group Chat, Episode 1: What If We Were Our Real Group Chat Selves in Public? ✨
We’re kicking off Take It to the Group Chat, season 3 of Friday Talks, by bringing one of my actual group chats to life for a conversation about, well, group chats. Allison Hill, founder of Hill Studio, a salon and wellness space for Black women, and Pacinthe Mattar, journalist, producer and writer extraordinare, join me to talk about the pros and cons of group chats for racialized women, especially those of us who belong to immigrant communities. Want more Friday Talks? Check out Friday Things on YouTube!
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