Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman Doubleday, HK$200
Ayelet Waldman is a Harvard alumna, a lawyer, the author of seven novels, second wife of Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Chabon and the mother of his four children.
She has also been diagnosed as bipolar and, at times, contemplates suicide ('It does not help to know that one's mood is a mystery of neurochemistry when one is ... evaluating the neurotoxic effects of a Tylenol, topomax, SRRI and ambien cocktail,' she wrote in 2005). That year, her controversial essay Motherlove was published; in it, she wrote of her 'vital, even torrid' sex life, acknowledged loving Chabon significantly more than their children, and expressed pity for the other mothers in her playgroup, 'wishing they too could experience a love as deep as my own'.
It is from this dubious emotional space that Waldman, 45, emerges with a philosophy of motherhood. Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace is both her first work of non-fiction and a best-selling anthology of essays, many of which were originally written for online magazine Salon. Although the range of topics is broad and intriguing - maternal work-life balance, Waldman's late abortion, the ebb and flow of sexual expression within marriage - she brings little insight, preferring to entertain eloquently.
The maternal archetype against which Waldman rails is, in essence, more the product of advertising copywriters than reality. The 'good mother', she believes, remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful, never yells, never projects her neuroses onto her children and is an active community volunteer.
Clearly, Waldman is the opposite - a loveably imperfect human being and also unconscious of her hostility towards her children, a hostility inherited from her mother. 'She was not pleased,' she writes of her mother's response to her decision to leave work to care for her children. 'She began a campaign to bring me back to my senses, her initial concern swiftly turning into anger.' Yet Waldman seems to perceive children as little more than delectable objects to be handled ('his baby skin ... felt like the freshest heavy cream tastes: smooth and round, fat and thick on the tongue') or material for her work; her empathy with their emotional experience is limited. 'I can't say that while [my son was in pre-school] I missed him as much as he missed me,' she observes. 'I did not prove my devotion by spending our time apart dripping tears ...'