Is queerness the latest publishing trend when it comes to books about motherhood? Have we exhausted all other iterations – yummy, slummy, tiger, helicopter, gentle, conscious, good enough and so on – such that queer people now offer the new take on pregnancy, childbirth and beyond? If this is the case, I’m fully behind it, because unlike those other #mumlife tropes, queerness represents a far more radical undoing of motherhood as we know it and is, of course, not a fad or a technique one can “try out”, but a deeply felt identity and lived experience. There is much that straight people can learn from having this LGBTQ+ lens put on conception, pregnancy and parenting.
Kirsty Logan’s searingly honest account of becoming a mum with her wife joins a growing number of queer motherhood memoirs. These include Claire Lynch’s Small, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Michelle Tea’s Knocking Myself Up. So I approached it wondering what else there was to say. What was new about two women having a baby? Why did Logan’s story need to be told? These are questions the writer herself grapples with throughout the book. By the end I was convinced not only that hers was an important story, but that her obvious struggle to tell it was really the point.
Logan is the author of novels, story collections, plays and collaborative writing projects that often rework folk tales and fairy stories. Her interest in myth and magic and her gothic predilections are also explored here as she documents, over four sections, “The Planning”, “The Growing”, “The Birth” and “The Baby”. As the title, The Unfamiliar, suggests, there is something inherently strange about nurturing a person inside your body and then giving birth to it. But elsewhere, the experience has been so normalised, wrapped in cuteness and cliche. Logan does an excellent job of portraying the reality – the beauty and the horror of it.
The book is written in the second person: “You and your partner want a baby. But your two bodies can’t make a baby together. So you need some sperm.” I found this jarring in the early chapters, when Logan’s partner is first trying to conceive with a donor (these attempts fail, and Logan herself carries the child to term). Being told that “you” felt this or did that was weirdly intrusive.
However, this device takes on a power I hadn’t expected in the penultimate section. I’d grown used to it by then and the account of labour and birth – the most darkly visceral and painfully, vividly, accurate I’ve ever encountered – was all the more affecting because of it.
This is a memoir that is at once self-aware and also free and unselfconscious. Logan recounts dreams (are other people’s dreams ever interesting?), conversations with her therapist (ditto), intrusive thoughts. Her musings range from banal to profound. She’s annoying at times, boring, funny, repetitive at others – but isn’t this the reality of an internal monologue? Isn’t this what it’s like to remember and process something while also living it? She is trying to get to the truth and that’s hard. “You’re writing the whole book in the second person because you couldn’t bring yourself to say I,” she admits.
The Unfamiliar successfully entwines the intellectual and the corporeal experiences of becoming a parent. Bodies, flesh, smell, excrement – it’s all there. As I read, I felt I wouldn’t have been surprised to look down and find the book itself dripping with blood and amniotic fluid. There is a sense that writing it has been its own kind of labour. Logan is pushing, pushing, pushing to get to the truth of becoming a mother. And perhaps the the queerness of the whole experience is the truest thing of all.
Lotte Jeffs is a journalist and co-author of The Queer Parent (Pan Macmillan, £20). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
The Unfamiliar by Kirsty Logan (Little, Brown Book Group, £16.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
