This essay collection is the ultimate Mother’s Day antidote.
by Michele Moses
The essays in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, released March 31st, are smart, heart-wrenching and deeply insightful treatments of the choice to forego parenthood. The collection included work by men and women, but it was refreshing and even revelatory to read personal stories of such depth, range, and complexity about women in particular. And they were beautiful. They made me cry; they made me feel connected and understood. Although they all ultimately centered on the decision not to have children, the essays were thematically diverse. The writers unpacked stories about their love of their work, their unresolved traumas with their families of origin, their ideas about feminism and womanhood, and their senses of self. They were glaring reminders of how absent these types of narratives about women are from the cultural mainstream.
This book is a necessary voice in young women’s ears, a reminder that we have options, and that we can identify as writers and explorers and teachers and friends and women and just people ahead of or instead of mothers. It’s somewhat revolutionary, but perhaps no more revolutionary than a collection of equally introspective, honest and cerebral essays about motherhood, giving it the intellectual and emotional legitimacy that it appears to lack. (Try saying “mommy blog” without sneering.) Even in this feminist-leaning book, the decision to have children is presented as either corporeal (a product of the “weird drug” that is “baby craziness” and “the ticking biological clock”) or spineless (where women succumb like hapless victims to doing what is expected of them). This attitude toward women as mothers echoes the way that female opinions and emotions are belittled in more conventionally sexist arenas.
Choosing not to have children is heavily stigmatized, but motherhood clearly faces its own breed of social shame. In explaining why her love of literature stopped her from wanting to be a parent, the novelist Sigrid Nunez captured it perfectly: “Motherhood is one of the most significant as well as one of the most widely shared of all human experiences…Yet who can name a major novel by a canonical writer, male or female, that takes motherhood for its subject?”
Autonomy and freedom are themes in every essay in the collection. But it seems both harsh and shortsighted to claim that “no” is choice and “yes” is thoughtless default. In her essay, the journalist Anna Holmes talked about how, now that she has reached her forties, she has grown into the ability to say no—to jobs, relationships, and social obligations—and she wants to relish in that ability to care for herself, which resonated with me so deeply.
But I think there is an equal degree of self-love and independence to be found in learning to say yes: in asking for what you need and saying I love you first and doing things before you are ready and guaranteed good results. In order for people, but especially women, to really have choices surrounding parenthood, both abstaining and partaking need to be seen as legitimate options, worthy of respect.
I recently listened to an episode of the podcast “The Lit Up Show” where Meghan Daum was interviewed by the show’s hosts, Emily Gould and Angela Ledgerwood, about the collection. The trio bungled through a discussion of what makes someone an adult, which Daum said is what childbearing is shorthand for. What makes someone an adult in society’s eyes, if not children? After reading this collection, it seems to me that adulthood is the will and self-knowledge to choose your own path, regardless of what path that may be.
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Michele Moses is a web producer at The New Yorker. Follow her on Twitter at @michelemoses10.
