Time seemed to dissolve as British novelist Doris Lessing pushed a pram carrying her nine-month-old son, and with every passing hour, she slipped deeper into the clutches of vapidness that had taken hold of her new life as a mother. Years later, she confessed in her autobiography, “There is no boredom like that of an intelligent young woman who spends all day with a very small child.”
When I spoke to novelist Diksha Basu about her memoir A Mother Is Born (published September 25 by Simon & Schuster), this is where we picked up, as if in the middle of an ongoing conversation that had started long before we met. Basu’s two daughters, Sky and Ivy, sixteen months apart in age, had just about finished listing the animals they had seen at the zoo earlier that Saturday, rushing to finish each other’s anecdotes. It didn’t take much insistence for Basu to agree to bring them back to the zoo the next day, but she was forthright in her refusal to pet their beloved creatures—lizards give her the ick. Looking back, I wondered if in reserving this small part of herself from the expectations of a mother, she was expressing something far more consequential.
“Do you ever get bored?” I asked Basu as the two of us waited for the elevator to steal away to the rooftop of her apartment building in Brooklyn. “I love talking to them. They’re really funny and intelligent. But,” she adds, “unlike my friends who have only one child, I don’t have to be their best friend. That distinction is nice.”
A Mother Is Born is a remarkably tender and tough account of the magnitude of impalpable change brought on by motherhood. The title brings to mind Alice Notley’s poem about childbirth—“He is born and I am undone—feel as if I will / never be, was never born”—but Basu’s memoir puts paid to that idea. She insists she is and doesn’t want her choice to be mistaken for sacrifice, that all too common discount applied pell-mell to mothers, especially in India, where Basu’s new book stands out in a sparsely populated category.
“I wrote it specifically for every South Asian woman, across diasporas, across the subcontinent, because I had heard these topics discussed amongst my white counterparts, but not as much amongst my brown ones,” Basu shared. She is quick to admit she came to motherhood with “minimal societal or familial pressure” and the liberty to define it on her own terms. Yet it is also, as Basu puts it, “the average story for humanity” and these strokes of life as a mother—“the mania, the joy, the loneliness, the terror, the complete shattering of yourself (or your partner) as you once knew her”—have universal echoes.
