218. Margaret Drabble — The Millstone with Carrie Mullins
KIM: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.
AMY: Hey, everyone! A few months ago, a listener let us know that the book we’re featuring today (The Millstone by Margaret Drabble) was (at the time) on-sale for $2, so of course I downloaded it — and then promptly proceeded to forget about it.
KIM: Been there!
AMY: Yes, an all-too-common occurrence. Luckily, I was reminded of the book as I was reading a nonfiction title published earlier this year: The Book of Mothers: How Literature Can Help Us Reinvent Modern Motherhood by Carrie Mullins.
KIM: Right. In fact, the first sentence of Mullins’s book mentions The Millstone, which was first published in 1965.
AMY: Exactly. Seeing it mentioned in Carrie’s book jogged my memory that I had it on my Kindle, so I ended up reading these two books in tandem, which turned out to be such a perfect pairing. Mullins’s unique insights are so helpful in my understanding of The Millstone.
KIM: Yeah, there are some great connections to be made, which is why we decided we had to have Mullins come join us for an episode.
AMY: Yes, so let’s take this pregnant pause (pun intended) to raid the stacks and get started!
[intro music plays]
KIM: Our guest today, Carrie Mullins, is a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in outlets like Parents, Food & Wine, Epicurious, Tin House and Publishers Weekly. A former national editor at the Serious Eats website, Carrie is also a longtime contributor to Electric Literature, where she covers the intersection of literature and culture.
AMY: In May, Carrie published The Book of Mothers which examines today’s cultural notions of motherhood through the lens of 15 classic literary moms. The book makes thought-provoking arguments through timely comparisons: likening Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennett to one of Bravo TV’s “real housewives,” for example, citing Emma Bovary as a harbinger to the cult of Instagram materialism and examining the politics of childcare through Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple. This book urges you to reassess what you think you know about some of the most classic mothers in the literary canon while pondering what lessons they can teach us today.
KIM: Yes, such a great book. Carrie shades her literary analysis with deeply personal reflections about her own maternal foibles and fears, including a particularly harrowing experience that parallels an incident in The Millstone. Carrie, we’re thrilled to have you join us, welcome to the show!
CARRIE: Thank you. Thank you for having me on!
AMY: You used a funny anecdote about the publication of The Millstone to kick off the introduction of your book. Can you explain why you wanted to start there? How does it speak to the bigger picture of what your book is about?
CARRIE: Yeah, so that story always makes me laugh. It's about how Margaret Drabble, she'd had two children. She was pregnant with her third when she sent the manuscript to be reviewed. And The Millstone is about a somewhat prudish graduate student named Rosamond who gets pregnant on her first and only time having sex, and she not only decides to keep her baby, but she falls in love with that baby and doesn't give up her job and manages to push back against all of these, uh, boundaries and preconceived notions that existed, especially in the 60s, um, in the UK. So you have to imagine that if Drabble is sending this manuscript out, she's anticipating getting some notes back from her reader, who's, by the way, a middle-aged man, about the more progressive parts of her book. And instead, he writes back saying, you know, I have a big problem with the plot because women can't get pregnant on their first try.
AMY: Oh, boy.
CARRIE: And it's just so hilarious because Drabble is pregnant with her third child, so you imagine she knows how the female body works. And that of all of the things that she says in this book about motherhood, this is the part that the man grabs onto. So, I mean, it's just so funny, but also so indicative of where we, continue to be when it comes to motherhood in literature, which is that it's not necessarily that there's a problem with how mothers are portrayed in literature, but it's how we talk about them, the notions that we bring to those portrayals. So it's not enough to say, well, you know, some of those moms are really old fashioned; they no longer speak to us. The question is, well, why? And how are we talking about them? Are we talking about that in a way that's useful or not?
KIM: Right, right. So there’s a moment in The Millstone when a character describes motherhood as “one of the most boring commonplaces of the female experiences.” You admit in the introduction to your book that you had no interest in reading about mothers prior to becoming one.
CARRIE: Oh yeah, none. I wanted to read books about the universal human experience (as if everyone doesn't have a mother.) But I think it's pretty common. We really package motherhood that way as something that is relevant only to women who have children. So I understood that the books that I should be reading to get that bigger experience were books about men, you know, and sometimes books about women, but certainly not about motherhood, which just immediately put up the walls of that silo.
AMY: Okay, so we’re going to be incorporating some of the ideas from your book into our discussion of Drabble’s book, but first I want to get into some of the basics about her life. (I feel like I am constantly showing my ignorance on this show, and here’s another good example: I had no idea Drabble is actually younger sister to the late novelist A.S. Byatt!!)
KIM: I didn’t know either! But we love literary sisters, so it’s great. I love A.S. Byatt’s work, so it’s a cool connection. Anyway, today Margaret Drabble is 85 years old. She was born in 1939 and originally hails from Northern England. Her father, John Frederick Drabble, was a county judge who also authored two novels in the 1970s (after his daughters started getting published). Drabble attended a Quaker boarding school in York where her mother was a teacher, then went on to Newnham College in Cambridge. (We learned a lot about Newnham College in our previous episode on Amy Levy, and our guest from that show, Ann Kennedy Smith, has a wonderful Substack about the literary women of Newnham called Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society.)
AMY: At college, Drabble’s life centered around the Amateur Dramatic Club where she met the future Sir Ian McKellan (and how’s this for nifty: a decade later McKellan starred in the film adaptation of The Millstone!) In 1960, Drabble married her first husband, fellow thespian Clive Swift and they joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon. She mainly had walk-on roles, but was an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Rigg!
KIM: Shortly thereafter, Drabble abandoned acting to forge a professional writing career. Between 1963 and 2016 she wrote 19 novels, in addition to some short stories and nonfiction titles — including a history of the jigsaw puzzle!
AMY: She’s got a lot going on, this lady! Okay, so as Carrie mentioned, Drabble had two children (and was expecting her third child) at the time she wrote The Millstone — her third novel. She has said she chose an unmarried protagonist so she didn’t have to write about marriage or dwell too much on the baby’s father. Carrie, what do you think that distillation achieves in this book?
CARRIE: Well, so the thing about Margaret Drabble if you read enough of her interviews, is that she can be a little bit glib. So I believe her when she says that she, you know, just didn't want to have to deal with the dad character. But on the other hand, the book wouldn't be itself if Rosamond was in a relationship. So much centers around this situation that this young woman finds herself in. So, I mean, if we go back to London in the mid Sixties, at that point, unmarried women having babies weren't just seen as promiscuous, they were seen as unfit for motherhood, you know, borderline mentally unstable. So you had a situation where, you know, between 1949 and 1976, an estimated 185,000 unmarried women were forced to give their children up for adoption. So it's not only that Rosamond doesn't have a boyfriend or husband, it's that she decides to keep the baby. Abortion was illegal in the UK at the time, but as in many societies now, if you are a woman of a certain means, you had access to it. So what we see in the book is that Rosamond's friends are all sort of encouraging her to do this. And then the specter of this forced adoption is also always there. So these are the things that make her decision to keep the baby so powerful. And if she had a husband, you know, none of that would really play out in the same way.
AMY: Yeah, even if you are with a partner, there's something about having a child that it's your personal journey. That's what this book is. It's her own personal journey with this pregnancy and with this child. There’s a line in your book where you note that women have “None of the control, but all of the responsibility.” Can you speak on that further, and what are the ways we see that in Rosamund’s experience?
CARRIE: I mean, it's so much the case today, but especially then. So she wrote the book in 1965, which means that contraception was two years from becoming legal in the UK. So that means that, you know, Rosamond decides to have… it is a consensual sexual encounter, but obviously the results of that are all on her. Ultimately, the pregnancy is on her and the raising of that child is on her. The buck will stop with her, which is, you know, the same for a lot of women.
KIM: So though her pregnancy makes for a tricky situation on a number of fronts, there are some distinct advantages that Rosamund has that other unwed mothers probably wouldn’t have had. She is living in her parents’ flat while they are serving as missionaries overseas, so housing isn’t an issue for her.
AMY: Right, she’s got a really nice flat. And she is also determined to continue working. She is getting her PhD in Elizabethan poetry. (even today I think about trying to do that while a new mother and I get panicky.) Her decision to keep her career a priority seems striking for the time period, I think. She doesn’t even think twice about it. Drabble writes in first-person, as Rosamund: “I suppose I must have a rock-like confidence in my own talent, for I simply did not believe that the handicap of one small illegitimate baby would make a scrap of difference to my career.”
CARRIE: This is so funny. This is Drabble's voice. You know, in her interviews I said she could be a little glib. I think it is absolutely that same voice in the book, which is so often hilarious. She is really confident at the same time, you know, kind of wondering like, “Am I so confident? I guess I am!” And she just sort of, you know, goes about it with this kind of funny indifference that allows her to power through what, for most people, would have been a completely insurmountable situation. In the Sixties not a lot of women worked, period. So to say “I'm gonna devote myself to this really niche academic subject and also raise my child…” I mean, her treatment of it, as though it's obviously gonna be okay, is, I think, meant to heighten, actually, how difficult that would be. And how unusual. Also, you know, she brings it back to this question of, of resources. And in the UK, that's often a question of class. So, Rosamund's parents have this beautiful flat in, I think it's Kensington. So when the ambulance comes to take her to deliver the baby, the way that the ambulance drivers treat her is pointed out, you know? They treat her with respect. Whereas if she had been picked up from a neighborhood south of the river, she would have been treated in a much different way. So I love that about the book, the way that she takes this kind of like funny, sarcastic angle, but never fails to recognize what the situation is and the challenges that Rosamund, even though she's acting confident, we know that they're there and for anyone else would have been the end of the story.
AMY: Exactly. This is all not to say that she has an easy time of it. She's got one portion covered, which is the apartment.
KIM:Yeah, and the other reason this situation works out for her partially is because she manages to have a workable childcare arrangement. This subject of childcare makes up a chapter of your book, Carrie, right?
CARRIE: Yeah, that was one of the most fascinating chapters to research. I was looking at the book The Color Purple by Alice Walker, which is, you know, about a young woman in the South at the turn of the 20th century who's black and incredibly poor, and she's married off to this widower and expected to raise his children. So, over the course of the book, she does that, but really with the help of her community, and at various times, um, the women are all sort of looking out for each other and their children. So it's this shared communal child care, and so it got me thinking, “Why is that the situation?” You know, this isn't the nuclear family, which is what in America, we have a really long standing relationship with that. It's our ideal, you could even say. So why does theirs look so different? And that was obviously a question of racism and misogyny and again, resources. So they couldn't afford all of these things. It's something that women had to fill in by necessity. And that got me thinking just about child care in general. So then I went down the rabbit hole and let me tell you, it's obviously a whole story that I had never really considered. You know, I live in New York City where we have universal pre-K, which is wonderful, but the other options are really expensive. It's hard to get into those programs. And so why is that the case? I had never really thought about it on a really granular level. And then I started researching in the Eighties, Reagan pulled funding from one of the biggest national daycare programs, and, you know, that was just going off of what Nixon had done in the Sixties, which was to frame daycare as like a Communist project, you know? As if by sending our kids out to daycare, we were all going to become socialists. Fast forward to today and in 2021 in Idaho, the state government turned down a grant for $6 million because they thought that subsidized daycare would hurt the family unit. So I was suddenly like, Whoa, there is actually so much going on behind the scenes that I hadn't considered and you know, we talk about all other kinds of social context and not the ones that pertain to motherhood, right?
AMY: And just the idea that you're just left to figure it out. You made that choice and now… good luck! Figure it out. You probably won't earn enough to actually pay for the childcare and sorry, no solutions here.
KIM: That’s your problem, yeah.
AMY: And I'm also thinking in terms of the scene in the book where Rosamund has to figure out what to do when she needs to leave in an emergency, so let's talk about the anxiety of that scene and just a mother's anxiety in general because Carrie, this is a whole chapter of your book and it's kind of intrinsic to what being a mother is.
CARRIE:That chapter is so interesting to read as a person mothering today because I was immediately like, “You can't leave your child!”
AMY: Yeah, so basically, baby Octavia is running a high fever. Rosamund's panicked.
KIM: Didn't they warn her that it could be serious if her daughter got sick too? So there's an added pressure…
AMY: Okay. Yeah. So Rosamund has to go out to a late-night pharmacy and try to find medicine for the baby, but it's raining. It's like the middle of the night. She does not want to have to risk taking the baby out. And the baby's sleeping peacefully right now. So she's like, “I think I can get out to the corner drugstore and get back, right?” But then she has all these thoughts about, like, what if there's a fire in the building? Like you're saying, Carrie, “No, I can't leave the baby!” So then she's like, well, how am I going to do this? She has no one to help her. She winds up having to knock on some neighbor's door…
KIM: They're having a party.
AMY: They're having a party. They haven't really ever had any interaction before, and she has to do one of those, you know, “My baby's sleeping upstairs and you're probably not going to have to do anything, but like, can you just keep an ear out?” It is so stressful.
KIM: So stressful.
AMY: I'm going to make a really funny story from my own life to compare this to. But I remember my daughter was just a few weeks old. I was a first time mom. And I was trying to just get out of the house and go do something. So I went to a fast-casual Mexican restaurant and it was really crowded, right? So I order at the counter and there's no tables, but I find a table far in the corner. So I cart the stroller all the way over to the corner, get the diaper bag and everything un-situated. I have my table, I'm going to be able to eat. Then they call my number and I'm like, “How am I going to do this?” It's packed. I can't leave her and walk the 40 feet through this crowd to go get my food, and I can't even hold it all. I'm not going to ask a total stranger to watch the stroller…
KIM: I totally remember that happening. I had it happen at the cafeteria at the Huntington and I was completely like, I've got this tray, I've got her, like, I need to leave her, like, how do I do this? it would have been fine, probably, just to leave her there. Like, but all that fear is so built into
AMY: yeah. yeah.
KIM: Especially, I don't know, it might be a very, um, American thing too, I don't know. Like the fear that you can't step away from your baby for one second. Yeah.
CARRIE: Yeah, I mean, in that moment, to put yourself in Rosamond's head, you can, if you've been a mom, like you guys have been saying, you have that spiral, you know, like what are all the various possibilities of disaster that could happen in this moment, you know, between me going out and getting the medicine or going to pick up my burrito or whatever, you know, it's these small moments that can feel so overwhelming. Researchers have realized that, Oh, actually your pregnant brain changes and there's a decrease in gray matter and an increase in certain hormones. And so you're literally more in tune with your baby, which also makes you more anxious. So at least for me personally, that was really nice to hear like, okay, there's a scientific explanation for what's going on. But also, like, once we have that realization, then can we go back and look at all of these moments and maybe have more compassion? Can we also build a society where that happens? Where mothers are supported a little more. So like in the book, when she goes to her neighbors, you know, what's so nice in that moment is that the neighbors are like, “Of course!” And actually I've been on that end. Um, I've been the mom who's like, what do I do with my baby in this moment? And then I've also been the person where like another mom in the park has been like, “Oh my God, I have to pee. Can you just watch my kid for a couple of seconds?” And it actually felt so nice in that moment to, like, be there for that mom. Knowing what she's going through, like the anxiety of just trying to make this decision, like, can I go pee in the park, you know? It's just, I think, so important to see that moment in the book and understand how real it is for Rosamund and how deep that anxiety goes. Because I think, especially the way that Margaret Drabble writes, you know that she's going to get through it because she is such kind of like a strong scrappy character, but just knowing that actually what she's showing us is, this anxiety, which especially when you multiply that one moment over the course of a baby's life or your children's life can become so overwhelming so fast.
KIM: Completely. And in Rosamund’s case, her anxiety is warranted, because she’s already been through a harrowing medical ordeal: emergency heart surgery for baby Octavia. At the end of the day, this book is a love story between mother and child, and we really see Rosamund owning the fierceness of motherhood when this happens. Carrie, I’m sure this section of the book must have special resonance for you, I’m guessing?
CARRIE: Yeah, absolutely. So my second son was born in 2020, which was the height of COVID and he was born, With, sagittal craniosynostosis, which is basically when the plates in a baby's head are not, there's no separation, there's no soft spot, which is sort of the way we talk about it, um, and so what happens is that the head becomes deformed and then over time, if you don't separate the plates, uh, it would like limit the brain growth and that kind of thing. So it resulted in, uh, him having surgery at 10 weeks old, like neurosurgery, splitting open his head. And that was, um, you know, something that I never anticipated, you know, with my first child. And I write this in the book, you know, when I'm talking about my anxiety, it's so, easy to understand, in a way, why I would be so anxious in that situation, but I thought I had experienced anxiety with my first child because just having a baby just opens you up to so much and you're worried about so much. And then when this happened it was on a whole new plane of worries. So I definitely, you know, reading the book could be difficult, you know, cause it brings back the intensity of like those feelings and especially the moments where you don't know what's going to happen are the worst. And also even just thinking about her interactions with the doctors, you know, who you want to be on your side, but you're also worried, you know? Are they doing the right thing? You're trying to evaluate it. So even though you have doctors who are theoretically professionals, you feel like you need to be somehow making the right choices too. And you feel that in her scenes. And so, yeah, it was tough, but also nice just to see that experience get recognized, you know, on the page.
KIM: Yeah, for sure.
AMY: And now I'm feeling really dumb about my “baby burrito” paranoia because that so pales in comparison with what you had to go through. Is he okay now?
CARRIE: Yeah. He's fine now. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Happy ending.
AMY: This book does remind me a little bit of, um, Barbara Comyns’ Our Spoons Came From Woolworths in terms of the hospital experiences and the maternity ward and things like that. Rosamund is a much stronger character in this book. The scene that comes to mind is when she is trying to get the attention of the medical personnel after her baby has had the surgery and nobody will let her see the baby. Nobody's giving her any information. They want her to go away. Um, and this is heart surgery that has been performed on an infant. And finally, Rosamund just snaps and she starts screaming in the middle of the hospital. And you know what? It works.
KIM: I was cheering for her!
CARRIE: I also love how she kind of like co-ops that craziness, you know? Like, something that's used to dismiss women is like, “Ugh, they're just crazy.” But she's like, I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna use it to get what I want.”
AMY: Yeah. “You want crazy? I'm gonna give it to you.” And then of course they want the screaming to stop so they're like, “Shut her up, give her whatever she wants.” So let's talk about this more in the context of your book, Carrie, because you have a whole chapter about mom rage.
CARRIE: Yeah, you know, that was also nice to write. Now that we're talking, it just dislodged a memory, which is… when I first brought my son, you know, we saw various doctors to try and get a diagnosis, and I walk into one office, you know, and I'm with my husband and I'm carrying my son. And the doctor just turns to me and goes, “You know I just want to let you know right off the bat, Mom: This is not your fault.” And I was like…????
AMY: What?!
CARRIE: Yeah, I was like, “Uh, okay, am I supposed to be thinking it's my fault?” And also my husband's standing right here. No one's, you know, asking him if he's taking responsibility for this. So just the trickiness of being a woman and mother in the medical space… I love that Drabble was able to put that into her book as well. It's just about so many things in what's actually a relatively short book. She covers so many bases. I think one of the things that I wish I had done in that situation was have stronger emotions, but that can be really difficult. You know, the expectations are that women don't, and especially when it comes to anger, so that to me is one of the stickiest maternal taboos —namely that good mothers don't get mad. And I wrote about Little Women, which is a book in which Marmee is often held up as, you know, the perfect mom. It's just how we understand her. So Greta Gerwig came out with the film version a couple years ago, and she includes the scene where Marmee says, “I've been angry nearly every day of my life.” And the media response to that was so effusive and also congratulatory towards Gerwig, you know, saying like, “Wow, what an amazing idea to put this in your movie.” And to her credit, she said, “I didn't make it up. It's been in the book this entire time.” You know, Little Women was written in 1868, so why haven't we noticed? And when I was thinking about it, I felt like it was because we can't reconcile those two things in our minds. Like good moms, the perfect mom, the sweet, knitting Marmee does not get mad. But she clearly does! It's right there in the book. So I think we're really uncomfortable, still, with the idea of women getting angry. And I think that part of the reason is that we correlate it with being a bad mother, and why are you a bad mother? Because you must obviously be dissatisfied with your kids and with the whole experience if you're also getting angry — as if you can't love your kids and also be angry, which then also I think shuts a lot of moms down because what an awful thing to have someone think, “Oh, she doesn't like being a mom. She hates her kids because she's angry about something.” But if you sublimate that, then what happens? You're not going to say that there's a problem. You're not going to start agitating for change. So by telling moms that they can't get angry, you're also really like keeping the status quo. So it's been a relief to see us start to pick away at that in the last couple of years. But, um, I think in a lot of ways, people still look at angry moms like they looked at Rosamund, like “you are crazy.”
KIM: Yeah, and I could see in the situation you were into, it's like you need help from this doctor. And so you want to do everything right so that you can get what you need to get for your child. So it puts you in a difficult position there. Anyway, throughout The Millstone, Rosamund maintains a sense of intellectual superiority and independence, yet motherhood significantly alters her sense of self. How do you think Rosamund navigates this identity shift?
CARRIE: She Was a young 20-something, with all of the freedoms that that entails. That shift to thinking about someone not just once during the day, but constantly, is really life-changing. I mean, it just changes your whole perspective on everything. But equally what I love about Rosamund is how much of herself stays the same. In the canon of literature she reminds me a little bit more of Rachel Samstat from Nora Ephron's book Heartburn, who is pregnant with her second child, but you really you feel like you've known Rachel forever; like she's a mom, but there is really no difference between how she was then and how she was now. There's been no huge transformation. And I get a similar sense from Rosamund. Even though she's suddenly dealing with taking care of another person 24/7, her interior self has a consistency which I really like, you know? Her belief that the Elizabethan poets are worth devoting her life to, you know? That doesn't waver even though she has a child. She just still has the same sense of independence that she had at the beginning. So I really love that too.
AMY: Something earlier in the book speaks to this, because there's a scene with a kind of previous boyfriend or suitor, where they're planning to have a tryst in a hotel room. The sex doesn't actually materialize, but they do go to this hotel, and she is planning on writing her name in the registry book as his name, you know, like his last name, so that it looks official and that they look like a married couple. But when she goes to sign the book, she accidentally signs her real last name. She is reluctant to give up her identity, right?
CARRIE: Yeah, I mean, what an amazing way to tell us so much about Rosamund in a small little interaction at the beginning of the book. It's just a great setup.
KIM: There’s another really powerful moment in the book, I think, when at a doctor’s appointment early in her pregnancy Rosamund sees a pregnant mother with two very young children. The mother asks Rosamund to hold the younger child for a moment, which she does, but it’s a very foreign feeling to her. After the appointment she sees the mother and children again on the street. Carrie, would you mind reading that passage?
CARRIE:
“She was going painfully slowly along the other side of the road: the elder child was stopping to look in every litter bin and to run up the steps of every building, and she did not hurry him along but paused to wait for him, hardly looking at what he was doing but standing still, eyes fixed, the smaller child slung, legs astride, over the swelling of the next. There was a solemnity about her imperceptible progress that impressed me deeply: she stood there, patiently waiting, like a warning, like a portent, like a figure from another world. Five months earlier I would have passed her without another glance, but now the weight of her child was heavy in my arms and my coat still damp from his dampness. I do not know how she could get along that road. Nor could I feel that weight till my own arms had tested it.
AMY: It kind of sums up what the whole point of the book is, right?
KIM: Yeah.
AMY: She knew nothing and then suddenly by the end of it she has such an awareness about everything related to motherhood. And I think it ties into your book too and what you were saying about, you know, you had no interest before. I don't think you have to experience motherhood to suddenly take an interest, that's not what I'm saying, but just sort of the recognition from this passage is beautifully put, I guess.
CARRIE: Absolutely, and it is exactly what I'm hoping to do with The Book of Mothers. I think that for me, this passage is really working on two levels, which is one, is to sort of recognize and in sort of a funny way celebrate that experience of becoming a mother and really being able to understand for the first time this like the long line of women. Like you're saying, that you are suddenly a part of it's just such a specific experience to be pregnant and to have a child (or to raise a child; to adopt a child and raise a child) just raising that child is you know, you can't in some ways understand until you do it. But that being said, you can absolutely get closer in the way that you can get closer to any experience that's not your own experience. And that's what this passage is doing for us. And that's what I'm hoping we, as readers, are going to do towards motherhood in general. You know, being somebody who owns up to the fact that I didn't read about motherhood, I was not putting myself in those shoes, and I believe that you can read this passage from The Millstone and get that much closer to understanding. I mean, I tell everybody to read this book. I told my husband to read this book, and he did and loved it. And that was just because it can be really difficult to explain these things to somebody who hasn't gone through them. I found pregnancy in particular sort of difficult to articulate and The Millstone was a great way of having my husband share in those things. A big part of the book is her pregnancy. Like actually, the baby maybe even is delivered after the halfway mark. So a lot of it is about her experience becoming pregnant and “Oh my God, now I'm trapped inside this body that's not mine,” which is its own incredibly unique, bizarre experience. In the book I wrote about it as being like people are suddenly commenting on your body as if you put on a sequined tuxedo that you had forgotten you put on, you know? You're like “This isn't even me, but everyone's commenting. I'm now this other person!” And reading The Millstone, I think actually my husband got a little bit closer to understanding what that's like.
AMY: I'm going to go back quickly to the passage we read and this figure of the other mother, you know, a mother of two with one more on the way. And, when she had seen her in the waiting room and like we said, the mother needed help and was like, “Please, can you hold this baby for a second?” Um, it's kind of a shit show. Rosamund's looking at it, like, “Oh my God, these kids are snot nosed. They've got filthy faces.”
KIM: The diaper's wet and it gets on her.
AMY: Yeah. So it's all so gross and it looks so grueling for the mom. And then, so she sees her again on the street and the line is “She sees her like a warning.” And so it's like, yeah, that's a beautiful moment, but you can also look at it the other way. It's ominous, like there's something ominous about it. And it also takes me back to the title of the novel, which is The Millstone. And when I hear the word millstone, I think of tying it around your neck and jumping into a river. Right? Like, so it seems really dark, but then there's also another way that you can look at that title. The title actually comes from a Bible verse: “If anyone causes one of these little ones, those who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
In that context, it's actually fiercely, “mama bear” protective. I love that the title works in both ways, because it's hard and also you're gonna fight like hell for this kid.
CARRIE: Yeah, I mean, when Rosamund goes into that waiting room, she describes it as something like a sea of misery, you know? It's the worst thing that she's ever seen. So, Drabble doesn't shy away from those two aspects of motherhood, you know, like the beautiful but also the painful.
KIM: Exactly. Exactly.
AMY: And that you're allowed to honestly be real about both, and you don't have to pretend that one side doesn't exist. Yeah.
CARRIE: I think different books offer us different portrayals of motherhood and some of them are more one-sided and it's important to talk about what that one side is and how we should deal with it. But these books that manage to come at it from both angles and can feel in that way (despite being written now, you know 50 years ago) so fresh. I mean, I read The Millstone and it feels like this could be someone I know. It feels so contemporary in her thinking, which, you know, I don't know if that says that we just haven't made enough progress or if it's just a really, really well-written book. I think it's both. And I just think it's such a good book for people who maybe were like me and think “Oh, I'm not that interested in books about motherhood.” This is a book to start with because it's so funny and it moves along really fast and the writing is so strong that you know, there's lots there that's also gonna then of course make you think about motherhood, too.
KIM: Yeah. Yeah.
AMY: Carrie, getting to read The Millstone while also reading your book, as I mentioned in the introduction, I felt like you gave me the little CliffsNotes to have alongside. And it's one of the reasons that we really do want to recommend The Book of Mothers because I think it might change the way you think about maternal characters when you come across them in your future reading.
KIM: Yeah, for sure, I loved this book. So, Carrie, thank you so much for being with us today to lend your perspective. This has been the best conversation.
CARRIE: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.
AMY: So that's all for today. I'll be back next week with a bonus episode discussing Virginia Woolf's influence on this year's fall fashion. If you own argyle socks, you are off to a good start, I'll just say that. You can get that episode by subscribing where you listen or at our Patreon page. Patreon also now sells all of our bonus episodes individually, so if you can't commit to a monthly subscription, feel free to pick and choose among our bonus episodes, if that's your preference.
KIM: And in two weeks, we'll be back with another regular episode discussing a lesser known children's book by Christina Rossetti. You could potentially read it as a clapback of sorts to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
AMY: Ooh, that's gonna be good. I can't wait. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.