Being a mother, for me, has had the effect of raising the ceiling on most feelings. My children (now eleven and seven years old) have carried me to new heights of hilarity and joy, but in the midst of these feelings I’m aware too of their corollary: the understanding, which arrived suddenly right after each of their births, that I’d made a terribly risky bargain, bringing into my life something whose loss I’m not sure I would be able to bear. There’s an almost supernatural quality to this state, the way it involves living inside two extremes at once.
And when I set out to capture this feeling in my new novel, The Garden, I found that the supernatural was one of the best tools available to me. My novel is set at an isolated hospital, a former country estate, in the late 1940s, where a husband and wife doctor team is trying out an experimental cure for repeated miscarriage—and where Irene Willard, their desperate but reluctant patient, discovers an abandoned walled garden with its own strange powers. As the doctors’ plans begin to go wrong, Irene finds herself gripped by hauntings that blur the line between external and internal. At its thematic core, The Garden is about pregnancy as a haunted house, an inner and outer ghost story.
The books on this list were my lodestars as I undertook this project—but more importantly as I have undertaken the project of living inside the wonderful, unlivable bargain of motherhood itself.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A motherhood-as-ghost-story urtext, The Yellow Wallpaper is an 1892 short story with a nonfictional seed (and a real-life agenda): Gilman’s desire to bring awareness to the horrors of the rest cure, which she experienced after the birth of her daughter. The story’s narrator, suffering a “nervous depression” after her son’s birth, has been confined by her husband to her room and prevented from using her mind, or doing much of anything, in an effort to cure her and equip her to be a good mother to her “dear baby.” She’s helpless before this plan, though she senses its dangers from the start; she writes in her illicit diary that “John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” Caged as she is, she becomes obsessed with her room’s wallpaper, which is, yes, yellow—and the longer she looks at it and reads it (prevented, of course, from reading anything else), the more unhinged she becomes. “There are things in the paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will,” she tells us, and soon the shapes she sees in the wallpaper begin to move. The haunting here is a function of her mind’s powers, thwarted in an effort to reshape woman into mother.
The Need by Helen Phillips
In this novel, one of the most terrifying I’ve ever read, a mother is haunted by the worst possibilities of her life with her children: an awareness that no matter the joys or the mundane challenges of her current child-filled moment, in a separate shadow-moment she has lost those children, has lost everything. Home alone with her toddler and baby, trying to find a book her daughter, Viv, is missing, Molly discovers an intruder in a deer mask in the other room: “She gripped her children as though the three of them were poised at the edge of a cliff, wind whipping around them, pebbles giving way between them. She could not move. She did not know how to pass through the next seconds of her life…But Viv was already stepping away from her, was already reaching to retrieve something from the deer’s black-gloved hands: The Why Book.” What if the intruder who’s coming to take our treasure and wreck our lives isn’t a stranger, but someone who knows us as intimately as it’s possible to know another person? This is a novel that bends and multiplies time and selfhood to show us motherhood’s existential threats, and the result is the feeling of the call coming not only from inside the house but from inside one’s own head.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
This novel is, to me, one of the most powerful ghost stories in literature. Its ghost, Beloved, is the daughter of Sethe, the main character, and their story’s horrors are based on real events: in 1856, Margaret Garner, a mother who had escaped slavery, killed her child rather than allow her to be recaptured. Sethe’s own daughter returns to her years after their own version of this episode—and Beloved has grown in the meantime, as ghosts tend to do, until she is a wondrous and strange mix of ages and times: a grown woman with “new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands.” Beloved’s arrival announces, and demands, a choice between herself, the precious, angry, and guilt-laden embodiment of Sethe’s past, and Sethe’s present. Sethe whose most central truth has always been, as she expresses in thoughts addressed to Beloved, that “…when I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours. I wouldn’t draw breath without my children.” The relationship between Beloved and Sethe ends up dramatizing in one of the most extreme and devastating ways imaginable the pull between self and child.
Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin
This gorgeous novel is set in a mysterious, remote mountain village that seems to exist outside of time, where life is in many ways idyllic—quiet, orderly, safe, full of various kinds of predictable pleasure—except that sometimes the mothers of the village simply disappear. Their left-behind children and husbands and friends then descend on their houses to dispose of their photographs and belongings, and the memory of the woman herself is allowed to (or made to) dissolve. Motherhood itself therefore becomes, definitionally, a state of risk, because it opens a woman up to the most total loss, random in whom it afflicts except in retrospect: “What connected these mothers? Their clues pointed in different directions, indicating recklessness and vigilance, insufficiencies and excesses of love. Love sublimated, love coarsened, love sweetened to rot…once a mother went, we saw it, something out of balance in the nature of her love for her children that set her apart.” The external and internal scrutiny of motherhood, its effects on both mother and child, is itself a haunting—as perhaps most mothers know.
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Part memoir, part translation, and part literary obsession so intense it becomes a form of possession. During her own early motherhood, Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to translate the lament of eighteenth-century Irish poet Eiblín Dubh Ní Chonaill, a poem about Dubh’s discovery of the corpse of her murdered husband and her grief-spurred drinking of his blood. Struck by how difficult it proves to find real traces of the poet’s self, Ní Ghríofa makes of her own self a conduit: she wills herself inside the poet’s life, inviting the poet into her own. “Of all that I desired in my own small life, the discovery of another woman’s days had become what I wanted more than anything else…I hoovered and scrubbed and read stories and wrestled duvets into coverlets, and all the while, inside me, she was beginning to feel more and more real.” Ní Ghríofa is so successful in this venture because the events of her own motherhood have thinned the veil between her life and other lives. “Who is haunting who?” she comes to wonder, and makes us wonder too.
Hao: Stories by Ye Chun
This extraordinary story collection follows Chinese and Chinese-American women, many of them mothers, through their efforts to find a language to convey their experiences. These are women haunted by the impossibility of expressing the fullness of themselves: the story “Stars” follows a mother who has experienced a stroke that’s robbed her of language; the story “Wenchuan” is told in the collective first-person of the mothers of children buried in an earthquake that collapses their school, mothers who are haunted by all they failed to say to their children. In the final story, “Signs,” the record-keeper who invents written language for his emperor finds that the shape of his own long-dead mother makes a perfect sign for the word “hao”: “a woman holding a child—his kneeling mother holding him on the roadside begging for food. This sign connotes so much to him that he cannot pin it down to one or two definitions. It can be a verb, a noun, an adjective, an adverb. It’s an image he continues to see when he closes his eyes.” Chun ties a beautiful ghost-tether between motherhood and language.
The Upstairs House by Julia Fine
Here, a new mother’s postpartum psychosis takes the form of a haunting by the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, Little Fur Family, and other deliciously strange children’s books. Megan’s dissertation on children’s literature has been languishing during her first pregnancy, but when her daughter is born, a new realm—literally another floor of her building—opens up to her. “And there it was, halfway down the stairs. An unusual door…intricately carved, its paint a peeling turquoise. I’d never seen it before…What was behind it? I couldn’t help myself. I knocked…I heard, ‘Come in.’” A treacherous invitation, Megan finds, once she accepts it. In this new world, which only Megan can enter, Margaret and her partner are very much alive, and full of desires, having taken new energy from the confluence of Megan’s mind and her body, her selfhood and her selflessness, her love for her daughter and her love for herself.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
The nameless (at first) mother-protagonist of this novel is, when we meet her, haunted by her life
itself: she’s an artist who stays at home with her two-year-old son, her husband is gone for the
whole of every workweek, and she hasn’t made or felt capable of making art since her child’s
arrival. She’s trying to disavow this part of herself entirely, her ambitions to have a life as an
artist or a life apart from her child at all. Yet the loss aches and churns and enrages: “How many
generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely?
How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs?”
Because this novel is also a marvelous fable, this mother’s haunting begins to take on a physical
insistence in the form of a gradual change into a dog—she grows more hair than she should have
in new places, a tail-like appendage, and newly sharp edges on her teeth—through, it seems, the
sheer pressure of her thwarted desire. Wonderfully, her child becomes complicit in this change,
happily playing “doggy games” with his mother. (I would argue that it’s really never exactly the
children themselves that haunt the mothers in these texts). At last the mother becomes
Nightbitch, a dog who runs free and feral at night: “She was hair and blood and bone. She was
instinct and anger. She knew nothing but the weight of her body and the pull of the earth against
it, the particular wetness of the night air…” The force of this mother’s desire to inhabit two
seemingly contradictory identities has forged her a new one, and the novel reckons with what
place she can find in the world for this new self.
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
Frida, this novel’s main character, must atone for a “very bad day” of parenting at the School for Good Mothers, where she practices mothering on a robot child who looks like her daughter Harriet (a robot child I came to love deeply over the course of the novel). The mother-students are forced to play an unwinnable game, their every step surveilled by a rigid, sinister system that’s full of impossible standards. “A mother’s love can cure most common illnesses,” they are told, and “Your voice should be as light and lovely as a cloud”; the warmth of their hugs, the quality of their vocalizations, the rapidity of their soothing are all measured by their dolls, evaluated by their instructors, and inevitably found wanting. What’s most powerful to me about this novel is the way Frida takes the school’s punitive system inside herself, monitoring her own reactions according to its rules—a kind of monitoring I think many mothers would recognize—out of her desperation to reunite with the child whose absence haunts her, even though she knows that reunion is entirely outside her control. The pain of their separation suffuses the book and Frida’s whole self. She thinks, “…Harriet should also have a doll that looks like her. Harriet should have a mother doll, sleep with it and tell it secrets, take it everywhere.” At the heart of this book is a beautiful, aching truth: it’s impossible not to want to be a good mother, even if we know that complete, irreproachable goodness in this realm is impossible too.
