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A review by jessicarosee
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel
5.0
“There is a word to describe someone who loses their spouse, and a word for children who are left without parents. There is no word, however, for a parent who loses their child. […] It is something so feared, so unacceptable, that we have chosen not to name it.”
Around two years after my mum had her first child, my older brother, she fell pregnant a second time. Yet, she was told this baby would face unconquerable problems once born in terms of its overall health, mental capabilities, and motor skills (if it even survived) forcing my mum to choose to give up this baby. I was born only 10 months later.
I feel horrible asking my mother about this time in her life, scared to bring up memories she perhaps never wants to live through again, yet time and time again she bravely chooses to slowly open up to me about what she faced.
Still Born is a masterfully ambivalent exploration of maternity and what it means to be both a woman and a mother. Our narrator, Laura, despises the idea of motherhood, choosing to, at a young age, become sterilised. Her close friend Laura, however, once too shared this apprehension towards children, yet now yearns for a child of her own, only to finally be granted her wish, until she discovers her unborn child has a fatal genetic disorder.
Guadalupe Nettel dissects the intricacies of the decision whether or not to have children and how exuberant, terrifying, saccharine, difficult, defining, and/or destructive, motherhood can be. Stories like Alina and Laura’s are rarely treated with such careful yet detached prose that allows a reader to feel the full breadth of emotions children can conjure. Nettel’s work is a nuanced and disciplined piece that facilitated my own understanding and empathy towards my mother’s decisions and experience surrounding her late child, as well as how I perceive my own role as a daughter, future mother/grandmother, and woman in general.
Set against a backdrop of feminist protests towards exponential violence against women in Mexico, Still Born is hard reading, contentious at times, and utterly confronting—but it is also beautifully understated and empathetic, marked by both tenderness and restraint. It is the best book I’ve read thus far in 2023, a new favourite.
Thank you to my boyfriend for gifting this to me!!!!
To my older sibling I will never meet, I think of you everyday. I’m not spiritual, nor religious, but I will forever feel the need to thank you for giving me the chance to live.
Around two years after my mum had her first child, my older brother, she fell pregnant a second time. Yet, she was told this baby would face unconquerable problems once born in terms of its overall health, mental capabilities, and motor skills (if it even survived) forcing my mum to choose to give up this baby. I was born only 10 months later.
I feel horrible asking my mother about this time in her life, scared to bring up memories she perhaps never wants to live through again, yet time and time again she bravely chooses to slowly open up to me about what she faced.
Still Born is a masterfully ambivalent exploration of maternity and what it means to be both a woman and a mother. Our narrator, Laura, despises the idea of motherhood, choosing to, at a young age, become sterilised. Her close friend Laura, however, once too shared this apprehension towards children, yet now yearns for a child of her own, only to finally be granted her wish, until she discovers her unborn child has a fatal genetic disorder.
Guadalupe Nettel dissects the intricacies of the decision whether or not to have children and how exuberant, terrifying, saccharine, difficult, defining, and/or destructive, motherhood can be. Stories like Alina and Laura’s are rarely treated with such careful yet detached prose that allows a reader to feel the full breadth of emotions children can conjure. Nettel’s work is a nuanced and disciplined piece that facilitated my own understanding and empathy towards my mother’s decisions and experience surrounding her late child, as well as how I perceive my own role as a daughter, future mother/grandmother, and woman in general.
Set against a backdrop of feminist protests towards exponential violence against women in Mexico, Still Born is hard reading, contentious at times, and utterly confronting—but it is also beautifully understated and empathetic, marked by both tenderness and restraint. It is the best book I’ve read thus far in 2023, a new favourite.
Thank you to my boyfriend for gifting this to me!!!!
To my older sibling I will never meet, I think of you everyday. I’m not spiritual, nor religious, but I will forever feel the need to thank you for giving me the chance to live.