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A review by spittingyarn
Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays by Siri Hustvedt
5.0
I am a long time admirer of Siri Hustvedt’s work, but it is her essays that always really impress me. This collection of essays on the theme of motherhood, though, is a real tour de force. Covid slowed my progress through “Mothers, Fathers and Others”, but if I wasn’t reading the book, I was thinking about it.
The essays explore motherhood from all angles, through personal reflection, scientific enquiry, psychoanalysis, art criticism and more. Despite the disparate approaches, Hustvedt’s voice is consistent throughout, as is the sense of her (and us) building a rich, many layered understanding of the concept of mother/motherhood.
So many of her ideas struck like arrows - the absence of representations of birth in art, the inexplicable disinterest of the scientific community in the placenta, her portraits of mothers and artists that reject archetypes and examine the whole person in all their light and shade.
As a mother, woman and daughter, I found myself thirsty for Hustvedt’s urgent, enquiring, rigorously intellectual excavation of mothers and the messiness of motherhood. Essential reading.
The essays explore motherhood from all angles, through personal reflection, scientific enquiry, psychoanalysis, art criticism and more. Despite the disparate approaches, Hustvedt’s voice is consistent throughout, as is the sense of her (and us) building a rich, many layered understanding of the concept of mother/motherhood.
So many of her ideas struck like arrows - the absence of representations of birth in art, the inexplicable disinterest of the scientific community in the placenta, her portraits of mothers and artists that reject archetypes and examine the whole person in all their light and shade.
As a mother, woman and daughter, I found myself thirsty for Hustvedt’s urgent, enquiring, rigorously intellectual excavation of mothers and the messiness of motherhood. Essential reading.