A "brilliant...essential and surprisingly thrilling book about
motherhood" (The New York Times) and the early postpartum days,
following a woman struggling with maternal fear and its looming madness
and showing how difficult and fragile those days can be--and how vital
love is to pull anyone out from the dark
"A radical novel...I'm obsessed with this book." --Jessamine Chan, New
York Times bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers
There is the before and the after. Withering in the maternal prison of
her apartment, a new mother finds herself spiraling into a state of
complete disaffection. As a translator, she is usually happy to spend
her days as the invisible interpreter. But now home alone with her
newborn, she is ill at ease with this state of perpetual giving,
carrying, feeding. The instinct to keep her baby safe conflicts with the
intrusive thoughts of causing the baby harm, and she struggles to
reclaim her identity just as it seems to dissolve from underneath her.
Feeling isolated from her supportive but ineffectual husband, she
strikes up a tentative friendship with her ailing upstairs neighbour,
Peter, who hushes the baby with his oxygen tank in tow. But they are
both running out of time; something is soon to crack. Joyful early days
of her pregnancy mingle with the anxious arrival of the baby, and
culminate in a painful confrontation - mostly, between our narrator and
herself. Striking and emotive, The Nursery documents the slow process
of staggering back towards the simple pleasures of life and reentering
the world after post-partum depression.
