SOLDIER SAILOR

In this intense first-person narrative, a mother explores the emotional extremes she has experienced during her son’s first years of life.

Irish novelist Kilroy, who has previously written autobiographical nonfiction about postpartum cognitive difficulties, joins the coterie of recent writers whose fiction exposes the dark alleys of early motherhood. A pattern of ambivalence, guilt, and overpowering love repeats throughout Kilroy’s novel. Narrator Soldier recounts to her 4-year-old son, Sailor, her difficulties in adjusting to being his mother: the depth of her love (“I would kill for you”), her exhaustion, her loss of independence and ambition, her resentment toward her largely clueless husband. A pivotal scene that shows the thin membrane “between coping and not” occurs months after Sailor’s birth, the day after Soldier endures a particularly nasty fight with her husband: In a state of fatigue and dejection approaching delirium, she decides to abandon her infant son in a misguided act of protectiveness “so another woman could love you better,” only to rush back when she hears his cry. While she never acts that scarily again, she shares other moments of milder derangement any mother will recognize. Soldier’s sense of isolation, exacerbated by her husband’s seeming obliviousness, continues until she meets a former acquaintance who happens to be a stay-at-home dad. Hanging out with her new friend at the playground makes mothering more fun and turns her into a “better mother” if a “worse wife.” While the friendship remains ostensibly platonic, her marriage reaches a crisis point. Kilroy’s central idea about the difficulties of early motherhood can feel familiar, but her narrator’s wit, brutal honesty, and unsentimental love for her child—and imperfect but ultimately decent husband—set this book apart.

A sharp, funny, often painful yet oddly hopeful take on adjusting to motherhood.