The ‘Keep Writing’ Substack and Podcast explores why we write, how we write, and how to do it despite everything. In this episode, we touch on so many ideas, from the Woman of Willendorf as a self-portrait, to the identity-earthquake of becoming a mother, to how to write like a human in academia, to autotheory, to neurodivergence and the need to tell our stories.
This was initially recorded for Calliope’s Writers, a community of mothers making time, space and energy to write.
If you prefer to read, I’ve captured an abridged and tidied up (edited) version in text, below.
A book born out of a Struggle to Breastfeed
George: Had you already had the idea for this book before you became a mother?
Jo: No, absolutely not. No. This book came out of, well, not out of nowhere, out of something quite radical, which is becoming a mum for the first time and breastfeeding.
And it came quite early on at that point in time where we had a lot of struggles with breastfeeding. It seemed like we'd got it all established and then there was so many different issues. And also just kind of grappling with that idea of what my body's doing now, who am I now, my identity, all of that stuff.
I was trying to find a book (optimistically cause there's no way I would've found the time to read it). But I was thinking, I've never seen a book about this aspect of breastfeeding. I hadn't found anything that looked at it from a historical perspective. It was always presented as something quite ahistorical, because it's natural. So it's presented as something that isn't subject to cultural and societal influences.
Plus, I'm an art historian, so, as an undergraduate in your first year courses, you are looking at quite a lot of pictures of, you know, Renaissance Madonna and child, that kind of stuff. So I'd seen a lot of images of mother and child and breastfeeding in art, and I really wanted something that was connected how we view art, because I know art is socially produced. So I wanted something to go: ‘Why were those images of those Madonnas at that point in time like that, what was happening with mothers and motherhood at that point in time? How is it different now?’
And there are some books out there that do deal with that history. Professor, Amy Brown has done a book. She's coming at it from a social sciences point of view. And I think the books that I did find came from that perspective rather than what I was interested in, which was more of a cultural perspective and I suppose more of a, a feminist kind of, theoretical perspective, a kind of auto theory of ‘what does this mean for my feminism?’
George: Auto theory?
Jo: Yeah. So this is something that I'm quite interested in. It's something that started with black feminists in the 1970s. That idea of the personal being the political and being able to derive theory from your personal lived experience.
I'm working on something at the moment that's trying to explore the connection between memoir and theory or auto theory.
So yeah, the book was something that came out of lived experience.
George: This shift of lens that happened when you became a mother, that made you go, ‘you know, I can now see almost everything differently.’ The personal narrative was so resonant, I recognize absolutely everything that you were talking about, even to the extent of having to go back into hospital and having to be in one of those feeding regimes and having to be on the pump. And, the way that ideas of the good mother and the divine mother and the motherhood complex comes crashing down on you at your most vulnerable moment. I found it a really good time to read it because I'm a long way out of it in a way. You know, ready to reexamine it. So, yeah. Thank you.
Jo: And I'm really glad you said that because obviously when you're writing these things and when you're living these things you think you're the only one. I certainly did because I was kind of under that impression that you're either a breast feeder or you feed with a bottle. And so, I felt quite, quite surprised, but also quite isolated and lonely in how we ended up having to feed. I knew rationally I wasn't the only one, but I felt like the only one. And I think I say in the book, you become quite self-absorbed, I think, when you're a new mum. It's kind of you and your baby, right? Because you're so focused in on, on just, you have no time to think about anything else.
And so even when I was writing the book a bit later, I thought, ‘maybe this idea of losing your own face, not seeing your own face, and only seeing the face of your baby, maybe that was just something that happened to me.’
And then so many people have gone, ‘that happened to me.’ And so that's really reassuring as a writer to have that connection.
I was thinking about those people who were out of that experience, but still maybe having some emotions around it and maybe emotions that they hadn't actually dealt with because it's such a busy time there and then.
And there was a Woman's Hour special when my son was maybe six months old, and I was listening to it, walking around the park. And there were women there who were now grandmothers and actually grandfathers as well, talking about their wive’s experiences, who still had quite complex feelings about that time in their life.
And I just remember thinking, ‘oh, I'm gonna have to deal with it for myself because otherwise I'm gonna carry this. I could potentially carry this for a really long time and I need to unravel it even if it's just for myself.’
The Woman of Willendorf
George: Another thing I picked up from reading the book, immersing myself in the book over the last few days, was that there's something about the way you are looking at art, which is about hypothesizing about who made these things and why they made them.
And maybe they made them for similar reasons to why you are writing this book, you know?
Jo: Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. And that, and obviously that's it's kind of a question you'll never know.
George: It struck me that no one - Is it the woman of the woman of Willendorf? It hadn't occurred to anyone that this might be a self-portrait?
Jo: Yeah. It took until the 1990s when some female anthropologists looked at this statue again and thought, ‘actually that could be what your body would look like if you're looking down at your own body.’ And that was one hypothesis. Looking at any artwork, you know, I don't want to say that we know an artist's intention or even that their intention matters. But it's been such a male Eurocentric, Western dominated field that even I carry that built-in assumption sometimes of, well, it must have been a man that made the sculpture 10,000 years ago. Why, why do I carry that inbuilt assumption? It could've been a woman or, you know, they would've had slightly different gender categories that are different from our own now. So it was really helpful to link my experience to something outside of myself and to a bigger historical picture.
It made me feel less alone.
George: I was just thinking about that as you were talking about the woman of Willendorf, because one of the things you're talking about is the fact that it's faceless and there's a, there's a kind of running thing about, you know, facelessness here, but actually if you are, if you are self doing self-portrait, you don't see your face, you know?
Jo: No.
You are looking down at your own body. Yeah. You are not seeing your face. You would also maybe see the foreshortening of your legs and stuff.
But also, if you are a woman or a birthing parent that has just gone through birth or you're going through maybe menopause or anything like that, we are so focused on the torso, so all of that kind of focus in the woman of Willendorf is around her torso.
George: So, for me, it doesn't matter if you're right or not, what I find interesting is the bringing of another lens, another perspective that has been absent. It's not whether it's right or not.
Jo: No.
Because we don't know.
George: But isn't it fascinating that this literally never occurred to anyone for so long?
Sharing Stories and Neurodiversity
I've got this quote here, from your book,
“we share stories to make bonds with others as attempts at kindness to relieve our burdens and possibly to assuage our own doubts.
My mother makes sense of her mothering by retiring the story of the time her daughter joined her during a night feed. Once they've left our mouths, these stories morph and take on lives of their own, folded into the tales of others. Sometimes we seek them out, other times they're foisted upon us. New parents are constantly told stories because older parents cannot contain the urge to spill their own secrets to make sense of their own journeys.”
When I read that, because I was about to meet you and talk to you, and your book created this urge to spill to spill the milk. Spill the tea. Spill the milk.
So that's, that’s an angle that I'm interested in; this urge to story tell, this urge to create.
And the other thing that crossed my mind when I read that quote was, there's been a lot of memes going around about empathy and about active listening and about how sometimes if someone's sharing a traumatic story, a sensitive story, other people will tell their stories instead of listening.
And, on the other hand, I've seen Neurodiverse thinkers saying that that's kind of a neurotypical way of looking at it. And actually, for some people who are neurodiverse, that is a form of empathy for them. It's saying, this is like this. It's almost putting yourself in your shoes.
So that was another thing that kind of jumped out at me from that and my own sense of ‘when should I share a story? When is it going to be seen as a judgment on the other person or, or unwelcome advice?’ And I think that's one of the things we're navigating in our communities, in cafes and things. ‘When should we share a story? When should we keep our thoughts quiet?’
Jo: Absolutely. And I felt that about the whole book itself. I mean, being neurodiverse. And being very aware of that tendency to share your own story in response to somebody else's in order to say, ‘yeah, I can understand something of what you're going through. Not everything. But something similar maybe happened to me.’ And being super aware of that and trying to stop myself from that impulse because I know some people don't like it because of that whole thing. Like you said, it's not viewed as active listening. It looks as if you're trying to take the conversation, I think.
So I had that awareness even as I was writing the book of, what right do I have to tell my story? People have had much worse experiences. Those kind of fears. And kind of telling your own story, saying, something happened to me and you might relate to it, and then going, well, why is anyone gonna read me anyway? So it's really funny how those fears and around empathy can manifest in those small ways, like day to day conversations, but also in our work as well, I think. Or certainly in mine.
I mean, it was never gonna be a memoir but if I'm bringing in history and art and some facts and all of that kind of stuff, then there's something quite protective about doing that at the same time as you're telling your own story.
Because you're saying, ‘I'm not just telling you my story.’ I mean, it would never have just been a memoir, that was never the intention. But I felt there was something quite protective about trying to layer in lots of different things to take the focus away from me and my story.
Archetypes of Narration
George: It's the blending of the two that is the power of the book, I think. I think if you'd just done the cultural history, I would've read it with interest, but it wouldn't have been as visceral an experience, it wouldn't have as been as emotional an experience.
There's something about giving us a main character, you know? A guide to hold your hand.
I often think about the archetypes of narrators. And the way they relate to the reader. Are they related to the reader as a guide who's like a little bit ahead, taking them a long? Or are they related to the reader as side by side with them? You were a guide to the cultural history part. You were taking us through a gallery, like a guide.
But I think that one of the things that puts people off reading slightly academic things, or even very academic writing, is that we lose that personal connection and that sense of equality.
We can sometimes feel like we're being passive or we're being transmitted information. But I think there’s something about bringing in a narrator who is more of our equal. We recognize ourselves in your experience and you are being vulnerable with us, and you are admitting you have no idea what you're doing a lot of the time.
There's no sense of you doing this in hindsight actually, it feels quite ‘presenty’ even though it isn't using the present tense. It's not like, oh, if only I'd known then, you know? It's very much that you are in the experience of, you know, ‘my baby doesn't weigh enough. This is terrifying’.
Engaging with Art on a personal level
Basically, I'm saying I think it's brilliant the way that you've managed to use that as a Trojan horse and how we now we feel like we are equals in this and we can see it through our eyes and look at this art through our eyes via you, rather than thinking, ‘I can't look at this art unless I'm a cultural historian and I know everything.’
Jo: I feel anyway that art and culture should be accessible to everyone. That you don't need to go and do a degree and, and know all about it. You don't even need to read the little text interpretive box in the gallery. Just respond. It can just be a really visceral experience.
And that's the beauty of art and culture, especially visual art, because it's not in words and it can just evoke a feeling or a moment of recognition or something. And I'm really passionate about that side of what visual art can offer. And so I wanted there to be a part of that book where I'm also experiencing that really visceral, I'm not doing it as an art historian. I'm doing it as somebody who's just in a gallery who's going through something in my real life and also seeing something that goes, ‘oh God, I can, I, I can connect with this’. It's giving me a moment of recognition. I’m seeing something of myself outside of myself.
I'm seeing something of myself outside of myself.
I never at the beginning envisaged it being a dry, you know, academic, cultural history.
Imposter Syndrome
There were moments of, I suppose doubt and imposter syndrome on that journey where Hmm. I was thinking, oh my God, I can't write this book. I need to go and do a PhD. Yes. On breastfeeding art and culture, because you realize the more you research the less, you know? And the more aware you are of experts out there working in these very specific fields. I wanted to make sure all of their work was referenced and I wanted all those people in there. But there was that moment of imposter syndrome.
Academic Writing
And more generally about my writing life, I, I found that from my twenties onwards, being in an academic space is kind of safe in a way, because you've got the academic conventions, you're not being vulnerable in your work. There is a way of writing that I don't like, but it kind of removes you as, as the narrator or as, as the person within it. But even in my PhD, I tried to bring in some of that, my subjectivity. Cause you can't, I, I'd like, I can't write about these things without bringing in Yeah. My subjectivity and subject position and where you are as the researcher in relation to what you're researching. So that's always been a part of my work. But then the actual writing itself and my agent kept saying, ‘there's some really good stuff, but you've gotta get rid of some of this academic language’.
George: Oh, really? That's what I was wondering about. Is this something you edited out or if you just naturally?
Jo: It was a blend, so I think a lot of the stuff came quite naturally. The non-academic writing actually came quite naturally. But then there were switches where it suddenly went very, very academic, and so it was trying to lose some of that academic training.
How Becoming a Parent freed Jo from Self-Doubt and Allowed her to embrace Creative Writing
Jo: But I think it's interesting when you said about the lens shift of new parenthood, it certainly made me less afraid of my own writing.
It gave me a different perspective and a kind of like, ‘fuck it’ kind of attitude actually. And I actually said that when I met the woman that went on to become my agent. And she said, ‘well, why now? Why do you wanna write this now and include memoir?’ And I just gestured to my kid in the buggy and said, ‘well, I've got a whole new perspective on like life and mortality and what's important.’
And actually being more vulnerable, not necessarily by writing about myself, but just trying to be more creative in my writing seems less scary, because ‘what's the worst that can happen?’ I felt a bit more fearless, I suppose, in my creativity in new motherhood.
Academia and transitioning to writing for a more mainstream readership
George: I think you're at the Open University now?
Jo: Yeah, I am. So I'm a part-time lecturer at the Open University. So I went from a full-time academic position and decided that at that moment in time, it wasn't the right thing for me. Plus full-time academic jobs are hard to find. I knew I wanted to write this book and I wanted the freedom to write outside of what I felt was a kind of, you know, university systems have a kind of -
George: What's gonna count in the REF?
Jo: Yeah. So, yeah, the metric by which universities are most judged and get most of their funding is through their research excellence. And so there is intense pressure on academics to publish and publish certain kinds of publications, in certain journals and for certain university presses.
Now some places will count trade publications, you know, commercial publications, self-publications. But I felt I wanted more of that freedom to explore this other part of my writing life. Plus the OU is great because I wanted to know more about online teaching, ‘cause that's what everyone everywhere is doing now, so, yeah.
George: I was really curious just from a, you know, former academic’s perspective, about how you navigated this transition into writing for a more popular audience. But that yeah, that's, that's interesting that for you, you wanted to be liberated from all the conventions and stuff that I suppose it's there to make our writing feel more scientific. But, you know, I remember I always had this feeling as an academic that what I was doing was trying to make my writing completely watertight. And that is very, you know, obviously there's a huge amount of respect for that. And scholarship is incredible and all those things, but, as a writer, it doesn't really gel with that creativity, you're kind of shutting down whole aspects of yourself.
So I read your book using Kindle and Audible cause I also have a ADHD. And I've got this app called Readwise, and what it does is when I highlight something, it puts it to read wise so I've got all the highlights. But I just happened to land, when I looked at them, it said, ‘we have more scientific research on tomatoes than we do breast milk,’ as I was thinking about scholarship and science and things like that. We're excluding certain voices, certain narratives, certain ways of speaking and certain topics.
Jo: Exactly. So I'm talking about this as if I made the choice, and I think anyone who's familiar with the academic context knows that actually, you know, it's, it's hard to find full-time academic positions that are permanent and secure. It's hard to do that if you've got a young family. And I just knew from a practical level, balancing writing the book I wanted to write, being a mother to a young child and being around as much as I would want to be around, wouldn't fit with, you know, possibly really long commutes and, and other things that might go along with it at that point in my life.
But, I think there was also something about moving away from my, like research specialism into something kind of different. So into breastfeeding and motherhood and stuff. And also, then being able to do that, as you said, in a kind of non-academic way, which I think in a way is academic.
We need to find new ways to talk about some of these things, some of these experiences.
George: It is academic, but it's not weighed down with that.
Jo: And it's interesting when you say scientific, because I, I spend a lot of time teaching and, and working on projects around decolonization, and a big part of that is thinking about, ‘well, what kind of knowledge do we privilege? What kind of expressions of that knowledge do we privilege?’ So we privilege the peer-reviewed scientifically written paper, even in arts and humanities or whatever. And the kind of knowledge, so empirical knowledge. That's the kind of thing that is privileged and so, I would argue that empirical knowledge, that's got its own biases built in, and it's usually built around a white European or Western male perspective. And so I think there's ways that thinking about different kinds of knowledge, like embodied knowledge being able to do things that you can do outside of a peer-review context. Around those different standards. It's just a different kind of knowledge production.
George: I guess I'm just fascinated from a distance by the way the academy is being challenged and decolonized and being questioned by people who are in this liminal ‘within and without it’. We're not in full-time permanent positions or we're -you know- So there seems to be some necessity for a lot of people to have one foot in one foot out, and that makes a lot of sense to me.
Jo: It does make a lot of sense. And I certainly feel that way, that I'm kind of one in, one out and I always call it precarity on my own terms.
I'm kind of thinking, well, where do I feel comfortable and where do I fit?
ADHD and Academia
Also, coming back to the neurodiverse aspect of it, I think having ADHD and being able to see connections between loads and loads of different things together, I often felt like an imposter in academia. Because I'm not gonna spend 10 years translating, you know, a handful of Southeast Asian bar reliefs or something.
My interest is gonna go from, ‘oh, I've done so I've done loads of stuff on Southeast Asia, now I'm gonna write the book about breastfeeding’. That freedom to be able to move, certainly is there, if you are a full-time permanent academic, you do have some of that scope. But I think that you tend to have less of that.
Funding
And the way that you would fund that research is to apply for a funding grant. And I think this is something that people don't realize within academia is you get paid a full-time salary. But if you want to do research, part of the conditions of your job is to get really large research grants.
And for writers who are listening or those of us who've been applying to like ‘developing your creative practice grants’ to keep us going, it's the same thing. You have to do that as an academic to do the kind of research that you want to do. And so if you're gonna win a grant, you're gonna probably be more likely to get a grant in that area of research that's related to what you've already done.
So I felt, well, if I'm gonna have to do that, I might as well just apply for funding research myself.
George: That's amazing. Oh, wow. That's so great. So the funding that you've received, was it from the Society of Author’s?
Jo: I did. So, I mean, to talk practicalities, obviously there was an advance and that funds your time, so you have an advance.
I then got a grant from the Society of Authors. To help me finish writing and just, you know, cover childcare costs and things. And then I recently got a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from the Arts Council for thinking about what I might do next.
George: But those are independent? You didn't have to be employed by a university or anything?
Jo: No, absolutely not. So for the Society of Authors, you just need to be a member which I really recommend for anyone. Especially if you are querying, if you are getting contracts through, they do a free contract checking service and it's basically a union.
So they can be really supportive. So you have to be a member, but obviously the arts council's open for anybody. And you don't have to have a contract or anything. It's really for developing you as a creative.
It's not gonna change your life in terms of the money, but it might help pay for a child minder for a few hours a week or whatever you need.
You know, that kinda stuff to, to help cover some costs. So there is, there are little pockets of money out there.
The practicalities of writing postpartum
George: So we're talking about the practicalities of how you get a book written and you've just mentioned childcare. So, in the acknowledgements, I think you said you were about six weeks out, someone's driving you around so you can sleep and the baby can sleep.
Jo: Parents.
George: Yeah. And you get this. I mean, I've been there. Yeah. And that's when you get the initial idea. So when did you actually write this? Like how old was your son when you were actually doing the writing?
Jo: The initial idea came really pretty early on. And I was hyped up on adrenaline, probably like post-birth, adrenaline sleep deprivation, adrenaline. And I've got this idea in my head that I wanna do and I was just like chatting away to my parents about it, I hadn't done much research at all. And then it was probably the three, four month period, five, it's really hard to say, isn't it?
Like roughly, that I started just thinking about it a bit more going, ‘why isn't there a book about this? And someone should write about this ‘cause it's mad. And then I started looking into stuff, you know, during a feed in the afternoon when I couldn't get to sleep or whatever. And started looking at the Welcome collection stuff. I met a new mum friend who worked for Welcome and I said, ‘oh, I've been writing about my own stuff’. She was a friend of a friend and she's a writer, Helen Babs. She's had some books published. I hadn't done much research at that point, but I'd just been like writing my own experience, you know, like a journal or something. I didn't really know what I'd do with it. And she said ‘that's the kind of thing that Welcome would be really interested in’. Because I said I wanted to bring in art and I was talking about it with cultural perspectives and stuff. She said, ‘welcome would be interested in that’. So I went away and pitched it to welcome stories. And they accepted it. And it was quite a personal, it was a mixture. It's basically what the book became. So memoir mixed with, ‘oh, and here's some old bottles, and if only I'd known that there were bottles thousands of years ago.’ Again, we don’t know, they wouldn't have been used as a breastfeeding alternative, but their very existence changed my whole attitude to thinking about bottles.
So Welcome published that and were brilliant. And they pay. So that was really amazing. And from there I thought the response, when that was published, the response was like, pretty, you know, people were kind of contacting me, saying, oh, I went through the same
George: How, how old was your baby when that was published? Roughly?
Jo: I was still on mat leave. So, yeah.
George: So it was pretty early, early days.
Jo: Yeah. I was still on mat leave and then it was published. About a year, you know, about six months, nine months later when he was a bit older, I was doing this in like snatches of nap time.
And it's the same with the book. To me it feels quite fragmented. Part of that, I think is just my sense of having ADHD and one minute I'm researching this bit of history and then 20 minutes later I don't really know how I got there, but I've got somewhere else. And sometimes the way I work feels very fragmented. But also I think when you're juggling caring responsibilities, the work itself is fragmented.
George: Time is fragmented.
Jo: I was using voice notes on my phone. I was typing it as I was walking. The brilliant moment was when he was about six, seven months and he could sit up on his own and I could put cushions around him and he would sit there quite happily pulling all his books off the shelf and flicking through them. And that would give me 10 minutes to maybe write an email or check something on a database like, so that kind of work was very much around, around juggling it with a baby, or my parents would walk around the park for an hour while I worked or, or whatever.
I was very lucky that they helped out or my husband.
George: When you were doing that, did you feel like you were writing a book or did you just feel like you were following a hyperfocus, like a detective? Or did you have an idea this is a book?
Jo:Yeah. I think I knew it was gonna be a book. I think I knew that there was probably a book in it. And my now husband used to be a bookseller and he was like, ‘no, there's definitely something in that’. Like, he was quite encouraging. Like ‘there's definitely something there. I could see that on a shelf.’
And then I just had that panic ‘cause I'm quite an impatient person, so I had a panic of ‘if I don't submit this as a proposal, someone else is gonna do it.’ Oh. Cause I was so, like ‘there's something here’. So, yeah, I put together a book proposal and started sending it out to agents after the Welcome article had been published.
On working with an agent on a non-fiction book proposal
George: So you'd sort of got a fair amount, like you'd been doing it, but you hadn't got a first draft?
Jo: No, no, no I did it on nonfiction proposal basis. So I had the thing that I'd published from the Welcome, which I worked up into a first chapter or that, that kind of worked hard. And then I had a chapter synopsis of the big themes that I could see emerging from what I was looking at. And then I sent it out to to agents.
And I think it's that thing of when you are that pushed for time and you're that tired, I didn't have all that normalreal self-doubt and self-critical thoughts. Didn't really have as much time for that.
George: That sense of urgency, that this is this book's moment and actually I can't believe no one's done this before, so I need to get it out there?
Jo: But also that urgency of knowing that I would lose that hyperfocus. I was like ‘in a year's time I won't care about any of this. I'd have moved on because, you know, my son would've been older by that point. And so I knew that I couldn't see, I couldn't see me sitting on it for a long period of time, ‘cause I'd find something else to think about.
So that was also part of the urgency, was I'm only gonna care about this for a bit of my life, and I might as well start working on it while we are still breastfeeding and while I'm still in it if I wait too long, I'll have moved on.
George: And when you got the agent how much involvement did they have, how much input did they have on shaping the book? Or did they just say, get it to me by this point?
Jo: No, no. So my agent, the lovely Jo Unwin, I partly chose her because she was one of the last people I saw before we went into lockdown. And you know, and I took my son to the meeting and, and it felt really lovely. We walked around the park, I was like, ‘okay. She gets the life juggle’. And she gave me some notes on the proposal I'd sent her and told me to go away and do a bit more work on it. And so there was quite a, I mean, again, I'm struggling to remember because I was doing it amongst all this other stuff and I'd gone back to work part-time, but we went back and forth on the proposal for quite a long time. I started working with her in March, 2020. And then my book deal was all signed December, 2020. So there was quite a long period of back and forth. She bought in an editor that she works with who went through my writing samples, ‘cause I think I did like two or three chapters, I think two sample chapters. So there was quite a bit of back and forth until she felt it was ready to take out to publishers and she also felt there was a right time to take it out to publishers. Yeah. So yeah, she's, she was quite involved in it and when I had those moments of doubt of going, ‘I don't think it should be memoir at all’. She said, ‘no, you need the memoir’. And then there was a moment where I said, ‘I think it should be all memoir ‘cause I'm too much of an imposter to talk about the history.’ She said, ‘no, that's your unique angle’. So she was quite good at sort of helping me through those wobbles as well.
George: Yeah holding that vision. Of what the book really wanted to be, even through the wobbles.
On audacity and pre-publication nerves
Wow. It's really, it's really quite exciting, when you’re looking through it in hindsight that, and you know, the way it works. And there's a certain amount of audacity that I just love, that motherhood gave you.
Jo: It was, kind of. Because I was like, ‘I just don't give as much of a crap anymore.’
And there's a certain amount of audacity that I just love, that motherhood gave you.
Jo: It was, kind of. Because I was like, ‘I just don't give as much of a crap anymore.’
Or I do, and that has now come back.
George: Oh no.
Jo: Came back in spades once the book was done and ready to go out in the world, and now I’ve got a bit more time to sort of dwell on things. I was like, ‘oh my God, what have I done? This was a terrible mistake’. And there was, full honesty, there was a moment when I wrote to my agent last year and said, ‘can I just give back my advance and get out of this contract? Cause I don't think I should do this anymore’.
George: I think it's really helpful for people to know that. I think a lot of people, part of their imposter syndrome is, ‘if I was meant to do this, I would find it easy. I would be totally confident. I'd have no doubts.’ And I always say ‘no, I've never met a writer who doesn't have doubts, you know?’
Jo: No, I'm pretty sure my agent has email templates that she sends out, that she must send out to people at various points in the publication journey. Because I would email her going, ‘oh my God, I'm feeling all of this’. And she would just say lovely things and say, ‘yeah, there's not a writer out there that hasn't felt this way. At this point in the journey you would be insane if you didn't have these pre-publication nerves and fears and all of that.’ So, yeah, I think everyone feels like that. No matter what you're writing as well. Fiction, non-fiction, everything.
Structuring the Book and ADHD
George: And then, on that topic of doubts, you mentioned that you often think of your writing as kind of fragmentary or the structure as fragmentary.
The experience of reading it is -and this is why I talked about the lens thing- is to me it was like a spiralling and -imagine a stacked series of lenses, and you start on one and you mention the same story almost in every section, when we hear about something we've probably heard before, you've told that story, but through a different lens of the early struggles and it's not like there's a hierarchy. It's not like you're spiraling upwards. It's just you're spiraling. Right. And just looking at it from different directions. I'll just take a moment, and get the contents page up, just to give people listening an idea of what I'm talking about. So it's six parts.
Part one, the good mother, part two. Was it the vulnerable, the vulnerable mother? Part three, the ordered mother. -Oh wow. That hit me hard as well- Part four Bottles and breasts. Part five, politics of milk. And then part six is Beyond Baby.
So yeah, it's not a linear story. Sometimes people manage to structure it by having a a linear story of someone's breastfeeding journey or someone's not breastfeeding, but someone's journey and then moving into kind of cultural history and all that kind of thing. But it felt very much to me, like, although the epilogue gives you this sense of linearity cause in the epilogue you talk about your weaning experience. So there was a sense of closure and I love that, you know, we are weaning as we finish the book -lovely. It didn't feel fragmentary to me. It felt recursive. Not in a cumulative way, but just a -perspective. Different perspective. Different perspective. Different perspective. I'm basically saying that to say the experience of reading, it wasn't fragmentary at all.
Jo: Yeah. That's nice to hear. I think it's the way I research stuff as well, and I think that's probably common for people who get hyperfocused where you're going, I really now have to throw in something about this part of history that I've just found, or like this thing I've just found. And then I'm also gonna talk about like, some dude in the 17th century, but then I'm also gonna relate it to Louise Bourgeois now. There's a way of bringing things together that isn't historically chronological. Because that was another way to structure it, would be to look historically with chronology in that way.
And that's just not how my mind works.
George: No, I could see that. I mean, I personally felt a sense of recognition in the way you'd done it. But also admiration because I think for people with ADHD we are -it's one of the things that I love about my brain- is the way it will make those connections in all different directions. And sometimes put it together. But then, you know, especially when you're sleep deprived and you have limited time and your time's fragmented as well, you don't have that, you know, ‘Cal Newport Deep Work’ stuff going on. It can be hard to remember why you thought these were connected. You have that epiphany moment and then you're like, ‘oh, hang on, I've lost it, I’ve lost it, I've lost it’. You know? That's what impressed me about it, was you did hold it into something that people could make sense of.
The Editing Process
Jo: That’s good and that's where good editors come in and editing. So even those parts that you described, that, that was really shaped working with my editor at, at WNN, Jenny. When I sent a first draft to her there was something about the ordering of it and I can't remember how I'd ordered it at that point. I don't even think it was the ordering. I think it was just the part titles that I had. She was, ‘it would make more sense if you restructured them’. So she really leant into that slightly recursive aspect, that more thematic aspect rather than, ‘yes, it has to be chronologically mapped onto memoir or chronologically mapped onto history’. She really was open to that sort of, ‘we can make it more thematic and draw out some of these issues around motherhood that you are touching on or around your body that you're touching on.’ So that's good editing as well. I think that helps.
George: That collaborative process.
Jo: And that's another thing to remember because I think I, I forgot that as I was writing, but whenever you read a book, you forget, right? That, that, that would've once been probably quite a bad first draft. Anyone's book, they would've had a moment where they just had a big paragraph going, I don't know what I'm gonna say here, but I need to - you know. And there's a lot of probably other people that are gonna come in and help you shape that story and that narrative as well. Yeah. So it's a collaborative process and it is for everyone. So these things don't come out fully formed.
Lyrical Language / Academic Habits
George: I haven't touched on the thing that I probably love the most about this book, which is actually the language, the way you write sentences. And I think maybe, because I've been an academic writer, and I wish I'd written like you've written this in my academic writing and not the turgid prose that I used. But there's something quite poetic, and I'm curious if those poetic sentences were the ones that came when you were spontaneous and feeling less encumbered by the cultural history stuff and the mantle of being a scholar.
Or did you kind of polish the sentences to sound beautiful? I'll find an example.
“In Southern India and Malaysia, engorgement is helped by spreading Jasmine flowers over the breast and holding them a place with loose cloth who collects these small white flowers? I picture an aunt or a husband leaving home at dusk just as the Jasmine buds open and released their intoxicating aroma.
Floral yet anemic. This duality seems fitting sensual and intimate, yet warm and fragile. I feel shortchanged for having had to cut my breast and thick sulfurous cabbage leaves when I could have been enveloped in blossoms”
I mean envelope. I mean, it's just the image.
Obviously you've got the imagery, but the actual sentence, like the vowels in my mouth are, you know, it's gorgeous. And you know, there's a rhythm, there's a variety of structures in your sentences. And yeah, just celebrating that on that level, it's absolutely gorgeous. And I think some of the pleasure, you know, there's a chapter in, in the book where you talk about pleasure and different kinds of pleasure and how we've got this idea that there's only sexual pleasure and breastfeeding can be pleasurable, and yet that seems somehow taboo. And, and also the aversion to breastfeeding as well.
Jo: Which also is, is taboo, I think. Yeah. There's a problem of a lack of language I think that we have to describe some of these experiences or lack of conventional language that we'refamiliar with. We've become very, very narrow in how we can talk about our bodies. And I wanted to kind of get at that, but I think.
I think what you were saying about that kind of writing, some of it did some of the more poetical writing came from as I was writing, like the memoir bits. Very early on where it's like a journaling type thing.
But then a lot of that came from the polishing afterwards and the taking out of an academic voice. That thing with the Blossoms was good. Cause I was like, well, how do I make this relevant and interesting. So we use cabebage, you use Jasmine.
It was trying to get a contrast between the two and to try and again, relate myself back into that experience by saying how did I feel as a researcher when I found out that bit of information, I felt really envious. I was like, ‘I want Jasmine'. And it's that, like you said, that guidance of having a researcher who's standing next to you while you are also finding out that information at the same time.
George: Yes, yes. So clever.
Jo: But I think, yeah, I think a lot of that came with the polishing because I actually, if I look back at some of my academic writing, it's trying to remove a lot of that poetical lyrical writing because ythat's not how academics write.
George: And we're literally, we are conditioned, aren't we? Because you don't become an academic without going through an undergraduate degree where you are conditioned that you don't write sentences like that. You write sentences like this. And youpin everything to a reference and, and you know, that's how you come to write academic books is being conditioned like that. I often say to people learning to write isn't learning to do something you can't do, it's learning to strip away what's getting in the way of your natural writing voice. That conditioning. So that's really fascinating to hear.
Jo: I think I was also very, very lucky in that my MA dissertation supervisor and my PhD dissertation supervisor Ashley Thompson originally got her degree in comparative literature and has often written things that are, well, I mean, she's a great writer, but that are kind of more lyrical, more creative, actually. I did an edited volume recently with a friend and Ashley submitted a poem in response.
George: Oh, beautiful.
Jo: So she was also very aware of that, and I think she had frustration in my PhD thesis of like, ‘what happened to your writing’. Because I guess I was kind of taking on a different style, which I thought I needed.
George: I always used to say when I was an academic, I'm just never gonna have the gravitas. . I just can't do it. I can do it in writing, but in person I would always fall short.
Jo: I don't have gravitas. Definitely don't have it in speech. Speaking out loud, so, yeah. Yea Again, it's partly just serendipity of who you get to work with.
George: Oh, that's so amazing to hear about. I could probably talk to you all day and we haven't really even scratched the surface because there was so much to talk about, but I encourage people to read it.
And one of the things that I really liked was the chapter on community as well. Because obviously I started Calliope’s Writers and that, that was kind of meant to be an extension of the breastfeeding group, but for writers. So I love the chapter on community.
And so yeah, I really hope people go and read it in many formats like I have.
Jo: And some of the writing, I mean, I never managed to make the Calliope’s Writing sessions as often as I want, but some of the book was written during those like Sunday evenings as well.
George: I love that
Jo: And I find that a very helpful way of working actually.
George: Yeah. That makes me ever so happy. And I will say that I shared your book with our -in Evesham where I live, we've got an amazing breastfeeding support group run by just completely, it's not a charity, so, A lady,
Jo: A wonderful volunteer.
George: Yeah. And it's been going for a very, very long time. And I made sure I wrote to her and said, you've gotta read this, because I actually think the new breastfeeding women themselves might not be in a position to read it but for the people supporting the breastfeeding women to have these stories at their fingertips would be just amazing.
Well thank you. Great. I'm really looking forward to seeing what's next for you. .
Jo: So am I, I dunno what it is.
George: Something completely unrelated.
Jo: It'll be completely unrelated, I imagine. Well thank you so much for indulging me for an hour.
George: Oh no, not at all. I, I really feel like that's gone so fast. Thank you so much.
Keep Writing: How a Struggle to Breastfeed Became a Successful Book