‘Wouldn’t it be great if I hadn’t had to write this book’: Marianne Levy, author of breathtaking memoir on motherhood, ‘Don’t Forget to Scream’, asks the big questions.
I read ‘Don’t Forget To Scream’ when my second child was five months old. Looking after a new baby whilst trying to manage a wild two year old and heal my ransacked body was brutal. Despite having a loving family around me, I felt mad and alone. And then I read Marianne’s book, and could breathe again. It is an urgent, deeply personal and, crucially, very funny series of essays on her experiences of motherhood, which she started writing two weeks after her son was born.
‘I really struggled after having my first child’, Marianne tells me, ‘and then it happened again with my second. But I found that when I tried to explain, I didn’t have the language for it. Language stopped working. For whatever reason, something about becoming a mother renders people voiceless. And so what I was trying to do was regain the language, regain control of the narrative, so that people weren’t telling me how I should feel, I could actually tell them.’
My daughter is now 19 months old and whilst memories of the exhaustion and desperation have become soft around the edges (like me), I see the book on my shelf and immediately feel strong and hard and heard. ‘You shout into the void, and the void does shout back!’ Marianne says, when we meet. She’s had countless messages from women and men so grateful that someone’s written about the gory stuff, the dark, lonely corners, the festering crumbs under the sofa.
‘It’s this huge visceral thing that’s happening to you and you’re expected to be like ‘ooh prosecco, that’ll make it ok’. Well no, this is fierce and elemental. You wouldn’t say to somebody grieving, ‘have a glass of wine’. So I suppose the book is against the pinks and the pastels, the jollification and toning down of the actual experience’.
Francesca Main, who also worked on Adam Kay’s memoir ‘This Is Going To Hurt’, was Marianne’s editor. ‘I was incredibly lucky. She’s really good at looking after her authors with a very gentle, delicate touch. There’s a bit in the book where I talk about my son being in neonatal intensive care: I didn’t really get to meet him until a few hours after the birth, but I remembered he had brown hair. I looked around and there was one of those little fish-tanks with a brown haired baby, so I went ‘hi, my baby’. This nurse slid out of the shadows and said, ‘that’s not your baby, this is your baby’. I’ve always told it as a funny story, but Francesca wrote in the margin: ‘I’m so sorry this happened to you’. I was floored, because it was the first time anyone had ever said it. So that part of the process was tremendous – I heartily recommend writing a memoir with Francesca Main, in order to feel looked after and loved!’
This feeling of security was never coaxed out of Marianne during the early days of motherhood, and she laments the lack of care and compassion for women in this country on a systemic level. ‘Yesterday I went and gave blood. There are signs everywhere saying ‘you’re amazing, thank you so much for coming’. Everyone was asking ‘now how are you, can we get you something to eat? Can I get you some squash? What flavour squash would you like?’ I didn’t have that when I gave birth! And it’s obviously not about somebody offering you which flavour of squash, but there was no sense of being looked after. It was an interesting lesson in how different things can be. I understand how we’ve come to be here, but it is not fine and women are not ok.’
I wonder if Marianne’s call to arms has incited change; more books have certainly followed Don’t Forget To Scream’s publication in 2022, including Matrescence by Lucy Jones, Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy and Hush by Kate Maxwell. ‘It’s amazing, but you have to find this stuff, right? When you’ve just had a baby, it’s not your best moment to engage in the world of literature!’ The sleep-deprived hoards have found her, however, making her their icon; a mouthpiece for a generation of women filled with exhausted, angry love.
‘The honest truth is that I was very hesitant to do the book at the beginning. Certainly for women of my generation - I hope this is changing - there is a sense that if you talk about your motherhood, you’re going to be taken less seriously in your professional life. I didn’t want this to define me, and of course now it absolutely has. And I’m so proud of the book – God knows it’s clearly the best thing I’ve ever written, it’s maybe the best thing that I’m going to write. But it’s a hard ask for women to merge those two worlds so completely, as I’ve ended up doing. And I’m still not necessarily completely ok with that. That merging of the private and public self I’ve found wonderful and problematic all at the same time; and I guess, that’s motherhood!’
I imagine it has been just as complicated promoting the book, being asked personal questions about her journalist husband and two children, now aged 9 and 5. My mother is a writer; embarrassing childhood stories and photographs used to make column inches when I was growing up, a particularly toe-curling experience as a teenager. Marianne has maintained their privacy admirably, never releasing names or images, keeping their identity safe, whilst bravely unmasking her own. ‘It’s difficult, and a really intractable problem; on the one hand, people say understandably that you shouldn’t write about your children, but on the other, mothers in the UK are never the centre of the story. They’re not seen as people, their stuff is pushed to one side, the gender pay gap is real, childcare in this country is a mess, and it’s because mothers are invisible. So how do you balance giving us back our voices, whilst also protecting the privacy of our families? I don’t know the answer, I really don’t.’
In Marianne’s world, finding the answers comes second to asking the right questions; we’ve got to poke the snake with a stick and ask why. ‘I’m trying to write about things that are frightening and real. Stuff that is personal and doesn’t get the fresh air or spotlight. It turns out, there’s still plenty of that!’ She is diligently scribbling away on her next project, between the hours of school drop-off and pick-up, Monday to Friday. Holidays sometimes included, with an extra serving of guilt.
‘There’s a piece towards the end of the book called ‘The Most Important Job’. Growing up, we’re told the most important thing is to find work we love that satisfies us, and that in a capitalist society, this shows us our worth. And also the most important thing in the world is to be a mum. How do you reconcile those two things? I feel like I’m being pulled in two.’
Same, same. It’s the unanswerable and inevitable conundrum that every primary carer faces. ‘On a societal level, there’s not a particular interest in fixing it. We need a top down approach. And this is why I found it so hard going into parenthood. Of course I wasn’t alright. Who is?’
March, 2024
