Little Labors

Mother writers

Both Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon had, it seems, babies. I don’t know to what extent ladies at Heian court raised their babies. From the books it is difficult to tell. But at least, it would appear, somewhat. Even empresses nursed. Shikibu in her diaries describes the patheticness of her empress’s baby not quite latching on. Shonagon complains in The Pillow Book of overly possessive wet nurses. Shonagon’s empress, a different empress than Shikibu’s, is sent away from court to have her baby, and though it was normal to be sent away, she was sent somewhere conspicuously low in status, she’s in political decline, and the passage in which Shonagon describes this pregnant exile is one of the most willfully cheerful passages in the whole book; that empress dies shortly after giving birth.

Today there are many writers who are mothers, sometimes writing specifically about motherhood, and in a genre that we recognize as literature. Or, at least, there are some mother writers, in this sense, if not many. There is Elena Ferrante, and Sarah Manguso. But among the mother writers of today probably two of the most celebrated are men: Karl Ove Knausgaard and, in his way, Louis C. K.