Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

Product Information

throughout the entire thing, which just seems like such an obvious question of how on earth the author could possibly have thought differently? Experimental flourishes in her text – alongside all that beautiful, accessible writing – also add to its majesty.

Moving from the early stages of her pregnancy to her eldest child’s first day at school, she describes how the mother’s brain literally changes shape, retaining extra grey matter for years, processing more information, emotion and memory.

I find myself inwardly cheering at one point when another mother describes how “insipid/idealistic portrayals of motherhood made me less interested in it as a young person.

Describing how it has enabled her to re-experience the past, she conjures “the scrape of armbands removed from an arm, the lemon-pine smell of hedgerow leaves and shrubs at adult-knee height, the dried-out film of a dead snail … the warm smell of swimming pools, the scent of my mother’s navy mohair cardigan”.Lucy Jones has raised so many issues, concerns, thoughts - which I had when I was early into Matrescence and thought maybe I was crazy. Her first book, Foxes Unearthed, was celebrated for its 'brave, bold and honest' (Chris Packham) account of our relationship with the fox, winning the Society of Authors' Roger Deakin Award 2015. I feel like I’ve finally been seen in this indescribable journey of what I now understand to be ‘Matrescence’. On one page, the phrase “This is how big it needs be” is repeated in a formation that reveals the size of a cervix in its centre.