Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S8 Ep14: Bookshelfie: Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

Columnist and writer Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett talks to Vick about motherhood, neurodivergence  and her love for quiet books which look at interior lives. Rhiannon is best known as a writer and columnist for The Guardian, co-founder of the feminist satire blog The Vagenda (later a book) and as a writer for Vogue, Elle and the Independent.  She’s also the author of multiple books. Her debut novel, The Tyranny of Lost Things, is a beautiful coming of age story that deals with trauma and memory, set against the backdrop of the 2011 London riots. Her critically acclaimed memoir, The Year of the Cat, explores her decision whether or not to have a baby, and how a small cat named Mackerel reminded her of just how much love she had to offer. Her new book, The Republic of Parenthood: On Bringing Up Babies, is a fearless account of the first years of parenting, drawn from her agenda-setting Guardian column, alongside new essays and beautiful illustrations by Pia Bramley. Rhiannon’s second work of fiction, Female, Nude, will be published in 2026. Rhiannon’s book choices are: **  Just William by Richmal Crompton ** Three Days in June by Anne Tyler ** The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë ** The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar  ** The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season eight of the Women’s Prize’s BookshelfiePodcast. Every week, Vick will be joined by another inspirational woman to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is the biggest celebration of women's creativity in the world and has been running for over 30 years.  Don’t want to miss the rest of season eight? Listen and subscribe now! You can buy all books mentioned from our dedicated shelf on Bookshop.org - every purchase supports the work of the Women's Prize Trust and independent bookshops.  Recorded May 2025. This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

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Join us in celebrating women's writing from around the world in the 30th anniversary year of the Women's Prize for Fiction, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives. I'm Vic Hope and I am your host for Season 8 of Bookshelfy, the podcast that asks inspiring and brilliant women to share the five books by women that have shaped them and their lives. Join me and my incredible guests as we talk about the books you should be adding to your reading list. Today I am joined by journalist and author Riannon Lucy Cosslet. Riannon's best known as a writer and columnist for The Guardian and has also a writer.

written for Vogue, Elle and The Independent. She's the author of multiple books. Her debut novel, The Tyranny of Lost Things, is a beautiful coming-of-age story that deals with trauma and memory set against the backdrop of the 2011 London riots. Her critically acclaimed memoir, The Year of the Cat, explores her decision whether or not to have a baby and how a small cat named McRole reminded her of just how much love she had to offer. In 2012, Rianne co-founded the Vigenda, a successful feminist satire blog, which was later published as a book and is a brilliant expose and guide to the madness of women's media. Her new book, The Republic of Parenthood, on Bringing Up Babies, is a fearless account of the first years of parenting, drawn from her agenda-setting guardian

column alongside new essays and beautiful illustrations by Pierre Bramley. Riannon's second work of fiction, female nude, will be published in 26. Welcome to the podcast, Rihanna. Thank you so much for having me. You're writing at the moment as we speak female nude. How's it all going? What can you tell us at this stage? Oh, so it's already been written. It's done. We're now at the copy editing stage and we've just sent out a few early bind-ups to people to see whether they like it or not.

And hopefully they will and they'll give a nice endorsement of it. It's about a frustrated artist who's on holiday on a Greek island with some university friends. and she ends up having a very passionate affair with a man that she meets. She's at the time she is with a partner who is putting her under pressure to have a baby. She's not sure if she wants to. She wants to be a painter. But unfortunately she works in a gallery shop selling finger puppets to tourists. And it's about the art world.

It's about how you juggle creativity with motherhood. It's about class envy and nepotism. And it's about female friendship. These are all themes that. I know we see in the books that you've brought today that you've chosen as your book, Shelfy books. When you are writing about all these things that I guess you felt or you are interested in or have been part of your world, do you find reading a distraction or do you find

a help if you delve into worlds of fiction? I think it depends. For this book, I did a lot of factual research. So I was reading up on, you know, the book, the novel takes. place over the course of 10 days and it's punctuated by these conversations that she has with various women artists, you know, like Alice Neal, Tracy Emin, Frida Carlo. And so I was doing a lot of factual research. So I didn't read much fiction at all. Whilst while I was writing the Republic of Parenthood column, you know, I used fiction as a way of escaping a bit from the kind of realities

of being a mum and all the research that I was doing related to that as well because I was doing lots of interviews. I was talking to lots of people in the parenthood space. So it was nice kind of when I was up in the middle of the night with my son, I would sometimes just read a novel and got through quite a few actually in the first year of his life, surprisingly. It's amazing what you can achieve between 2 and 4 a.m., you know, in terms of reading. Well, I've been warned, I've got a little one on the way and I've been warned that I might need to use a Kindle because I'm a huge fan of the, particularly a hardback book. I like that. I like that. I like, the feel of it. I like to hold it. And everyone said, you're going to have one hand. Yeah, yeah. And the other

thing is, of course, you know, the rustling of the pages even might wake the baby. So the good thing about a Kindle is that it's dark and it's quiet. And so you can read a book in a darkened room next to a sleeping baby. I mean, you know, I do it on my phone. I use the Kindle app on my phone because I've got quite a big phone, which works as well. When you say the word escape, what books give you that. What do you gravitate towards? Oh, that's an interesting question because I'd say I read quite widely. I mean, I love women writers, obviously, some of my favourites, you know, Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk. But I love reading expansively. I love coming across new stories. I'm not particularly

selective in my choices, I'd say. I, you know, I sometimes read real, you know, trashy page turners in order to just escape. And then sometimes I read. I try and do one classic a year, one meaty classic a year, because I didn't study English. All the books I studied were Italian. So I'm kind of playing catch-up still on that. So, you know, one of those books that I chose today was found while I was doing that kind of catch-up classics reading. Did you study Italian? Yeah, I studied Italian.

Yeah, yeah. Art history and Italian. Yeah, so I'm obviously a huge Ferranti fan and also Elsa Marante, you know, lots of other Italian writers as well. Well, you do span eras and generations and worlds in your pick. So let's take it right back to the beginning. Your first book shelfy book you've picked is Just William by Rich Mill Crompton. Now, whether he's meant to be babysitting, putting on a show with his trusty gang of friends, the outlaws, or adventures with his faithful dog jumble.

Mischievous 11-year-old William Brown always has a new scheme up his sleeve. The first in a 38 book series published over a period of almost 50 years between 1922 and 1970, Just William is considered a cult classic. Yes. Yes. And sort of, you know, I'm being a bit cheeky because it's not just Just William. It's Just William and all of the other. All of the Just Williams.

All of the Just William books. I think I've, I don't know if I've read all of them. But I've definitely read at least 20 of them. My grandfather had them all. He had these very tattie red hardbacks in his house that were kind of, you know, the spines were falling off and the covers had, you know, thinned out. And they were, they were. So from a very early age, I was reading those books.

even though they're not really children's books. Well, no, this is the thing. There are themes that looking back now, we see them through adult eyes and this amazing commentary on the world in which we live. But sometimes seeing that world through the eyes of a child can help us make a bit of sense of it. Or can at least with that clean moral compass that we haven't had to compromise yet as we kind of move into adulthood, it can be helpful. helpful. Do you think that perhaps we should read more children's books? I mean, I think what's interesting about Just William is that it's not really a children's book. It's written very, very satirically. I mean, you know, I'm the mum of a small boy now and small boys are inherently funny.

And it kind of is about that. He gets into these scrapes and these adventures and it's constantly kind of annoying the adults around him. and when you read them as an adult you kind of you see how amusing they are whilst when you read them as a child you're kind of I think I wanted to be William I used to think that I was in love with William but I think actually I wanted to be him

because he's this rebel you know who's constantly having these crazy adventures he's always trying to get money so he can buy sweets and stuff and he's always got schemes and he has these mates that he calls the outlaws and the vocabulary of them

It's just extraordinary. I mean, I used to have a notebook, and I would write down every word I didn't understand and then look it up in the dictionary. I mean, the kind of range of her vocabulary is insane. She uses words like meritricious, you know, and monologue. And obviously, when you're seven or eight, as I imagine, I was. Yeah, no, maybe a bit older, maybe nine or ten.

You were cross-referencing. I was kind of looking up these words. And, you know, I think the way I use language now is largely, thanks, to that, you know, from learning these words at a very young age and what they meant, and also the importance of humour because they're very, very funny. As a mum to a young boy, do you think that Crompton writes young male characters in a way that feels true to life, at least in your experience? Oh, definitely. I mean, there are some things that are just perennial, even though they're, they were written in the 1920s, 30s, 40s. She instinctively understands children.

I think she was a teacher for a time. And although she didn't have children herself, she was a much loved aunt, and she was a teacher for a while, I think. But yes, she just gets them. She just gets them. And she's compassionate towards him, as well as being very humorous about him,

which is lovely. Have you returned to the book? Do you read them to your own son? So I haven't read them to my son yet because he's a bit little. But I did, actually, when my grandfather was dying, that was the last thing I did was I read him. I read him, William Enter's Politics, which is a particularly funny one where he tries

to get into this political meeting of the liberals who are campaigning locally in an election. And his way of doing it is that he puts an empty frame around his head and pretends to be a picture on the wall, which fools nobody, of course. And the way she does it, it's just brilliant, it's brilliantly hilarious. She's very funny about politics as well. And, you know, my grandfather was not in a very good way, but he smiled as I was reading this to him. And, you know, I know that was a lovely memory for my mum as well as for me.

You know, that he kind of returned to these books that he'd loved as a child. And that he'd introduce you to. And that he'd introduce me to, yeah, exactly. This sort of subtle commentary on social norms on class distinction, but through the eyes of a child, especially in today's political climate, actually. You just mentioned, you know, William does politics. It can help give us adults a different perspective in many ways.

I actually read that Crompton saw that her real work was writing adult fiction. That's how she saw herself. She writes incredibly prolifically writing 41 novels, nine collections of short stories for adults. You also write in multiple formats, turning your hand to fiction, nonfiction, column writing. Does the idea of writing a children's book, bringing in any of those themes that you love to explore to this format, does that appeal to you? I've never thought about it really. I think a lot of people kind of think they have a children's

book in them. I think sometimes there's an assumption that they're easier to write perhaps, but actually I think they're very, very difficult to write. I'm not sure I'm up to the task, funnily enough. Perhaps maybe one day. But yeah, I do think it's quite a challenge writing for children. and there's a lot of, you know, I read a lot of books to my son and there's a lot of rubbish out there as well as being really good. Yeah, no, loads, you know, rhyming books that don't scam properly and things really bother me and, you know, rubbish illustrations. I mean, the quality, you know, obviously there are fantastic children's books,

but the quality can be quite low at times as well. It's funny that you say that because actually I've heard quite a few authors who've written amazing works for adults. say, I don't know if I could do it, but you find a lot of people turning their hand to children's fiction who have no aspirations really to write. I mean, the real thing with celebs kind of doing kids' books and that. But I think it's really honest to say, actually, I don't know if I could

because I feel like there's a great responsibility in viewed in writing a children's book, which perhaps we don't always take as seriously as we should. Yeah. I mean, one of the great things I've found about motherhood in which you'll find as well, is that you get to experience childhood again through the eyes of another person, which I never, it was something I never expected, really, when I thought about being a mum. And yet, actually, it's one of the most rewarding parts of it is that you get to, you get to remember what it felt like to be a child. So perhaps that's why so many parents end up writing children's books is because

it puts you back in that mindset. So maybe in a few years, I'll be even more embedded in that Mine's fit and I'll feel able to do it. I don't know. As he grows as he goes through all these different stages, that's the magic, isn't it? We were at antinatal class last night and we were talking about hazards around the home and that we were encouraged to all crawl around our homes so that we could see at eye level what the hazards would be. So maybe that's the beginning of seeing things from that perspective.

Absolutely, literally. Rianne, your second book, Shelby book is Three Days in June by Anne Tyler. The latest novel by Multi-Women's Prize Shortlisted Anne Tyler. days in June is a sharply funny novel that follows Gail, whose world is turned upside down just before her daughter's wedding. A funny, hopeful story about love, marriage and second chances. And what the younger generation often has to teach the older about secrets, acceptance, and taking the rough with the smooth. Tell us why you chose this book. I have always loved Dantyla. I've been reading her since I was a teenager. I think no one writes families better.

Yeah. She's just brilliant at those relationships between people over long periods of time. She just is a wonderful, wonderful chronicler of the familial and the domestic. And her perspective as an older woman writer as well, I think is, you know, really important. I actually read a lot of older women writers. I love Tessa Hadley. I love Anne Patchett. I love Elizabeth Strout.

You know, Tyler, to me, though, in this book, I feel like she's just at the height of her powers. It's a very, very short novel. You know, she can write big 400-page tomes as well. But this is an incredible kind of masterclass in economy. Yeah, word economy. Exactly. It's on point. I think it's about 176 pages or something.

Yeah, it's very slim. And as the title suggests, it's set over the course of three days, which again brings its own challenges and also means that you sort of are very immersed in this world as well. Now, you've talked about how the story really resonated with you, not only as a child of divorce, but also how it quietly explores neurodivergence. I know that you cared for your autistic younger brother from a young age. How did you find this book explored that?

Well, it's very subtle, and she hasn't spoken as far as I know about her character being on the autism spectrum, but it felt very clear to me. It's essentially, Gail is essentially a character who doesn't really have theory of mind. She finds it very, very difficult to put herself in other people's shoes. She struggles with social interaction and social cues. It's done with great sensitivity and great humour. There's a wonderful scene where she goes to the hairdressers and the hairdresser tries to make small talk with her. And she's just so completely out of her comfort zone, she can't bear it.

and this woman, you know, we see almost the entire book through, kind of through her eyes. And as it goes on, you sort of come to understand what happened in her marriage, but also what drew her to the person that she was unfaithful in her marriage with, which is that he similarly was kind of separate and removed and distant. and it's kind of a lesson in self-understanding as well. She comes to understand that she's sort of been holding herself back from feeling. And I think what's great about it is that we get a very, very deep understanding of this character and how she feels.

And we feel a lot of compassion for her. And we leave, I think, with a greater understanding of the human capacity for difference and how we interact with people differently based on our kind of brain structure. And I think it's not written to instruct, but I think we leave the novel understanding cognitive differences and hopefully go into our own lives with that understanding and compassion. She might disagree with my interpretation,

but it came across very strongly to me. Well, Anne Tyler is such a master of writing these interior lies. of her characters, of explaining, exploring, depicting their interconnectivity and their interactions as well. As are those authors that you listed just before, actually Tessa Hadley and Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, who of course was shortlisted for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction. Why do you think these women in particular are so good at that who can really get inside of us? Well, first of all, I think women are good at that. And I think women are able very well to write both men and women, whilst I think some male authors struggle to write women.

And, you know, I think it's an element of our kind of social conditioning in terms of we're taught from a very young age to kind of think about how other people feel a lot. The type of fiction that they do was dismissed for a very long time as being kind of domestic and uninteresting. You know, it's often not about these grand themes or adventures. It's quiet books. I like quiet books. I've always thought that was the term for them. Books that look at interior lives. And I mean, I think they're all geniuses.

And what makes them so geniuses is how they are able to convey truth about human nature on the page with such kind of style and economy and humor and insight and intelligence. And there is like, I'd love that word, there is this quiet but powerful thread about how the past and particularly family history shapes the present, influences the future. Do you see any reflections of that in your own life, in your own relationships? Could you connect with that on the page? Oh, that's a good question. I mean, I think we're all shaped by our past, aren't we? Of course.

Certainly there are certain themes from my own. life that I've carried into my fiction. You know, the protagonist in female nude has a disabled sister and she's a very important person to her, but also having been a carer makes her scared to be a mother because she's not sure she wants to go back there. And I certainly felt that before I got pregnant. I suppose caring is very, very hard work.

And when I left home at 18, I wasn't a carer anymore. and I got to spend most of my, all of my 20s and most of my 30s not being a carer. And I think I found it daunting the idea of suddenly being a carer again. But I, you know, I wanted to do it. I always really wanted to be a mum. So I think that's one way in which I've been shaped by my past, definitely. Bailey's is proudly supporting the women's prize for fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women,

celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Baileys is the perfect adult treat, whether shaken in a cocktail, over ice cream, or paired with your favourite book. Check out Baileys.com for our favourite Bailey's recipes. Your third book today, Rianan, is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte. When the mysterious and beautiful young widow, Helen Graham, becomes the new tenant at Wildfell Hall, Rumors immediately begin to swirl about her. As her neighbour Gilbert Markham comes to discover, Helen has painful secrets buried in her past

that even his love for her cannot easily overcome. Written by the youngest of the Bronte siblings, the Tenant of Welfare Hall published in 1848, shortly before her death the following year, and is often considered one of the first feminist novels. Now, we all grew up reading Charlotte and Emily at school. And doesn't get the same spotlight.

No, she doesn't. And I mean, I was about 10 or 11 when I first read Janeair, and I was about 13 or 14 when I read Wuthering Heights, which was a set text for GCCC. So I think every school child in the country read it at that time. And I was a bit of a pro, you know, I was a bit of a, I had goth tendencies, let's say. So I really loved the kind of violence and darkness of Wuthering Heights

and the kind of passionate romance and the ghosts and the, all of that gothicy goodness, yeah. exactly. And, yeah, and Bronte didn't really get a looking until I was 34. I read it while I was pregnant on a beach in Greece. It was one of those classics that I was trying, you know, I play catch up with my classics, and that was the classic of that year. And my jaw was just open for, you know, I was going,

I can't believe how radical this is. You know, it had completely passed me by. And it astonished me because it's essentially about a woman. a mum who flees a violent relationship. And it was incredibly shocking at the time, and it's still shocking now. Yeah. Because of the context of the time in which it was written.

I mean, it's just a masterpiece. And I couldn't believe more people weren't talking about it. Why do you think it was overlooked? Well, the themes were really difficult for people. I mean, despite the fact that he's violent and abusive, and he's a horrible, violent, abusive, alcoholic. He's abusive towards her. It's about coercive control, essentially.

He offers her out to his mates. You know, it's really dark, really horrible relationship that she has with this man who she's married because she fell in love with him and kind of overlooks all the hints, all the red flags to use common parlance. Yes, you know, to use modern flags. She overlooks all the red flags and she marries the sky and she escapes. But, you know, legally she could have been compelled to return to him with the child. I mean, he basically owned her. And so she's in this house in hiding, basically,

so that he can't make her go back. And it shocked people. It really shocked people. Charlotte didn't like it. She was critical of the novel. She was very critical of it. And it's put me off her, really, actually, when I found that out. Really? Yeah.

I just thought, oh, what a prick. I could do that to your sister. Yeah, come on. You know. Support women supporting women. Exactly. No, she was ashamed of it. she, because of it, because of how radical it was and how shocking, it got absolutely slammed

in the reviews as well. So it's really helpful for writers. You know, if you ever get a bad review, think about Ambronte, poor Ambronte, whose book was just completely slammed by everybody. But yeah, it's an absolute feminist masterpiece. I'm so glad you were compelled to pick this up later on. I mean, it offers such a realistic look at women's lives in Victorian England, the impression they faced. But it's still like you, like you just, It resonates with you as a woman reading it in the 21st century. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, these are still, thankfully, women are much better able to divorce than they were then.

But, you know, that question that women are faced with when they take a while to leave violent relationships, you know, why didn't you leave him? I mean, this book kind of examines that. And, yeah, it absolutely resonates today. and it's a wonderful, not wonderful, and it's a powerful reminder as well of how far we've come and what the women of the past had to face in terms of the abuse and control of the state towards them.

Well, actually on the subject of control of the state, on another level, looking at the censorship of Ambronte herself or the criticism, reading, you know, it was a huge pastime of Victorian England, but there was also this idea that fiction could somehow corrupt women, making them dissatisfied with their lives. Like it could get in their head.

What do you think, thinking of that now in the context of censorship of books and the way that, I mean, we're seeing around the world, a lot of autonomy kind of stripped back, going backwards. Absolutely. And, you know, when the tenant of welfare hall came out, there was a review that said women should not read this. They basically said nobody should read this, but particularly not women. And I think, you know, well, exactly in the context of the bodily autonomy that's being denied women in the United States and the rise of the far right globally and the kind of congruent rise of censorship. It's very, very concerning. You know, I think it, it, the tenant of welfare hole shows us the danger in suppressing books in the sense that.

you know, I'm sure many, many women who would have benefited from reading it at the time were denied that right. Yeah. You know. And it's as personent today. So if any of our listeners, you know, have read Charlotte and Emily Bronte, but not Anne. Yeah. Pick it up. Yeah.

And it's not a gothic novel. I mean, the premise is Gothic. You know, a mysterious woman in a crumbling house that everybody's gossiping about, you know, who is she? Does she have a lover? Is she illegitimate? What's going on? But actually, it's a realist novel. And what's so sad is that Ambronte died so young.

I mean, if she'd lived, what would she have written? The whole direction of the novel probably would have been completely different. Well, from Anne Bronte to an actually more modern Gothic novel, your fourth book is The Nursery by Sylvia Molna. In her cramped New York apartment, a mother wiltz beneath the intense August heat, struggling to adapt to her role as the silent interpreter of a newborn baby's needs, balancing on the fragile tightrope between maternal instinct and the longing for all that she's left behind.

In this mesmerizing portrait of the first days of motherhood, Sylvia Molnar's debut novel, Lays Bear, the strength it takes to redefine who you are, rediscovering the simple pleasures of life along the way. Tell me about how this book impacted you. Well, I read it not long after my son had been born, and I was writing a column in a national newspaper about the experience of being a mother,

which I started writing when he was four weeks old. In fact, I started making notes in the hospital after he was born prematurely, but I filed my first copy about four weeks later, and so I was writing pretty much every week in real time. And I think what's wonderful about this novel is that it has that feeling of being in real time. And so much that we read about motherhood

is constructed afterwards, understandably, because looking after a small baby is all-consuming. and time-consuming and exhausting and you know you have sleepless nights and trying to create something under those conditions is very difficult so it's not surprised that many people haven't done it. They go back to it and they write it afterwards

and there's lots of great writing about motherhood that's been written afterwards but it lacks a kind of viscerality that I think this novel captures and a physicality as well. It's a very bodily novel and I've always been interested in my fiction in writing the truth of the female body.

You know, everything that is written has been created by a body. And one of the things coming from a background in Italian literature that I've always found curious about English writers is that I think they can lack that physicality. It's almost like they feel that they've had to dispense with it in order to be taken seriously. Whilst French and Italian writers, much more courageous women writers about writing the body. And I think that's what Sylvia achieves,

is that she writes the body, she writes the body of a mother, as well as the mind of a mother. And it's just brilliant. Well, she's Hungarian-born American. She does this amazing job of describing motherhood in those early stages, like you say, very physically, very viscerally,

which perhaps we've not seen by English authors so much. How do you evoke that rawness? Oh, I mean, she talks about how it feels to breastfeed. the pain in her breasts. You know, she talks about the pad between her legs that's soaking up the blood that she's lost. She talks about the kind of clumsiness of sleeplessness, how you bump into things and you drop things.

The strangeness of it. And the things it does to your mind as well. I mean, you know, it's essentially a gothic novel about postnatal depression. And I can remember from, you know, I didn't have postnatal depression, but I did struggle with breastfeeding and it did affect my memory.

mental health and I was very lucky in that I got support for it and I didn't get more and well but I could easily have done. You're very vulnerable in those in those times, you know, and you need your support around you and she's very isolated and she doesn't have that support. So it's also about maternal isolation in America which is, you know, as we know, because they don't have a welfare stay here, far more pronounced than it is here and we struggle with that here. I mean, you know, mothers are lonely. We know that from reports, from statistics. We don't live in those big communities anymore. We live in small nuclear families,

and that's not how we were supposed to raise children. And her kind of sanity starts to disintegrate. And I know from looking after my incident, I mean, there were times when he wasn't sleeping, where I hallucinated that I could hear music. And I was talking to Alice Vincent the other day. I did an event with her and Natasha Khan, Bat for Lashes, about sound and women listening.

and one of the things we talked about is how you hallucinate babies crying when you're not your baby crying when you're not there you hear kind of phantom cries that aren't there because I think what happens when you have a baby is you have this kind of very high level of attunement you know you talked about hazard spotting

you sort of become an automatic hazard spotter even if it's not there yeah but you know not everybody has them but it does seem quite common and there's been no studies on it at all and it doesn't mean you're going mad I mean, it's, you know, it's just something. It's kind of like when you think your phone's vibrated in your pocket.

And it hasn't. It's a similar thing. You think your baby's crying, but they're not. They're asleep. It's absolutely fascinating. And you're right, not studied. We've seen that with a lot of things. Yes.

When it comes to women's health, postnatal depression, early motherhood, they are key themes, like you say in this book. Your satirical feminist blog, The Vagenda, analysed female topics in the media. How did you find that these experiences were represented Why did you want to satirize them? Oh, I mean, we all grew up. Did you grow up in the 90s and early 90s?

Yeah, yeah. So we all grew up in the era of the magazine. The magazine, Mids, shout, sugar. Sugar, Cosmo sex tips. Yep, more. You know, learn about blow jobs there. Yeah, exactly. 200 ways to please your man.

Yep. Never about you. No, no. No, you know. I had no idea you're supposed to enjoy it. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we all grew up in that environment, and it's only now, really, that we're reckoning with how toxic.

that was for a lot of us, you know, with how celebrities like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, the kind of media shaming that they were subjected to. I kind of think in a way the agenda was a bit ahead of its time. It came out at a very odd stage in women's media, which is that magazines were on the decline, and Instagram was kind of on the rise, but hadn't quite got there yet.

And so in a weird way, it's almost a swan song for that kind of publishing. We don't have magazines, the same way that we did when we were teenagers. But it has certainly informed me in my later work, you know, in the Republic of Parenthood, I'm always looking at how the media is covering parenthood. And I can remember being pregnant and kind of looking at a feature that was saying, you know, all the things you need for your baby's nursery. And it had a crib that rocks itself that costs more than a grand.

It had, you know, really expensive furniture and decor. And I think, you know, we're still being subjected to these kinds of It's just that the context has slightly changed. And the platform as well. Exactly. So like influences, basically women are making themselves into magazines now. Yeah. That's where it is.

It's on Instagram. It's on TikTok. Yeah. Exactly. And it's still about you spending lots of money. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously, like some of it is really concerning the rise of the trad wife as a kind of

hidden vehicle for far right ideologies. It's really, really disturbing. So sadly, I kind of feel like things have got. worse, not better, which is really sad. Because I felt like the Vagenda was doing something really important and that I know that it meant something to the girls who were reading it at the time. You know, it got some quite nasty reviews, all from journalists, some of whom had been criticised in the book.

But we didn't write it for them. We wrote it for the girls who were teenagers then. You know, that was really important to us. In the Year of the Cat, which is your memoir, you discussed your decision about becoming a mother Help by Macral, your cat. How did you find putting pen to paper about that incredibly personal yet in many ways? I'm going to say quietly political decision. I mean, I had to do it.

I was writing my novel at the time and a cat wandered into my novel. And I had to put my novel down and write the cat book. It's just how it came about. I was compelled to write it. I didn't know what I was writing at first. You know, because of the year of it, the cat is the year of the pandemic and it's a time when people were very isolated and I got this cat kind of as a way of seeing whether or not it would help quell the desire that I felt very strongly

to be a mum but I didn't want to do it when it felt like the world was falling apart you know and I was interested in another strand of the narrative which is about cat women women who have cats and women who are childless or child free and how they've been stigmatized historically because the stereotype goes all the way back to witches and you know I was interested in examining that question what does it mean to be a cat woman what does it mean to be childless or child free

what does it mean to care for a being that is much more vulnerable than yourself what can it teach you and how does that inform our decision making And like you said before, you're negotiating it in real time. You're working it out as you go along, which brings us nicely to your fifth and final book, which does just that. It's navigating that journey.

It's the baby on the fire escape. Creativity, motherhoods and the mind baby problem by Julie Phillips. Award winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge with fierce empathy. and vivid prose. Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audrey Lorde and Alice Neal, who wants to finish a painting, was said to have left her baby on the fire escape of her apartment. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness. The baby on the fire escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives. Why do you want to talk about this book?

Oh, I mean, I think everyone should read this book, but particularly if you're about to have a baby or you have a baby. Because it's about how do mothers make art? And, you know, she says in the book, she's trying to find a pattern. You know, she's trying to find a roadmap, I guess, for how women have achieved this over the years. And there isn't one. Each artist or writer that she profiles went about it in their own specific. way. And I guess what's so interesting about it is not so much that it's a roadmap, but it shows how kind of creative and innovative you have to be in your own life in order to

make space in order to create when you are caring for people. And I think that's a negotiation that so many of us face, you know, especially once you have a baby. You said that this book gave you permission almost to write as a new mother while you're a new mother, not after while you are. You're writing your regular Republic of Parenthood Guardian column, your new novel at the same time expanding your column into a book. It's a big job. It's a new skill in many ways. How was that process for you? How did you find it personally? Well, you know, as I said, writing in real time, I went back and looked over what I'd written and I couldn't remember a lot of it. You know, if I hadn't written it down, I'd have had a completely different viewpoint.

You asked me about breastfeeding now. I breastfed my son for 14 months. We've combifed because that's what we wanted to do. And I think more people should know about it. You're not told about combing, really. I was under immense pressure to breastfeed exclusively. And I really, really, really suffered with it. He was preterm, you know, he had a tongue tight, it really hurt. But if you ask me now, oh, how was breastfeeding? I'd say, oh, it was great. You know, I can remember, I can remember what a state I was in, but I didn't write, you know, if I hadn't have written it down, I don't think I'd spin it in the same way. And I think that happens a lot. I mean, we know it from talking to our parents, right? You know, they have a

tendency sometimes to put like rose-tinted spectacles on their own parenting. I think we all do it. Well, there's a level of validating how they did things as well. Absolutely. Making sure that we don't feel guilty for what we might have, inverted commas, put them through. I think it's multi-layered why we look back on things in a way that is comfortable for us. Yeah, and often, like, they can't remember either. You'll go, oh, it wasn't like that at all.

Or you'll ask them, you know, I'd say to my dad, oh, how old was I when I first started walking? and he'd be like, I don't really remember, you know. That's why I think it's so valuable to write it down, and I'm so glad I did. But reading, yeah, reading over it is a very odd experience. It's kind of like, I felt enormously proud of some of the pieces I'd done that were political. You know, one of the pieces is about volunteers who act as birth companions to migrant women, who are alone, who need someone there with them when they're laboring. You know, I did a lot of interviewing while I had my son.

on my breast, you know, I'd be feeding him and I'd have my phone on speakerphone and I'd have my dictaphone on. So I felt kind of proud of myself as well. I know, I know it's not, it's not kind of chic to say that, but I did feel kind of, I think what women can achieve when they're also doing this incredibly demanding, draining, draining work of looking after an infant. I mean, you know, that's what's so brilliant about the baby on the fire escape. It's like, these women were geniuses. And they created masterpieces. Often in the fact, of complete indifference. You know, Alice Neal, I think, was in her 70s before she got a major show.

She had some recognition early on, and then she kind of, you know, because she was a portrait painter, it was very unfashionable. But she kept going, like so many of these women artists did. And she worked at a nursery to support herself financially while looking after her sons. She wasn't always a brilliant mother. She didn't leave her baby on the fire escape. That was a complete myth. But she wasn't always the best mother.

And, you know, it's an uncomfortable book in the sense that, you know, you're not, you're not always looking at these women's lives and going, oh, yeah, you smashed that. You know, and I think that's important as well to have those honest conversations. Being able to. Absolutely, yeah. It's a perfect example, this book, of how women experience this sort of double burden. And this idea that women are supposed to manage domestic responsibility and also professional ambition. And you're sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't. there's so much shame wrapped up in it on all these platforms.

I see it in things I get served on Instagram, which I'm trying to just not look at. What do you make of this sort of, this standard that women are held to? There's impossible standard. Oh my God. I mean, I just, you know, I spent a lot of time with my mum in the first year that my son was born. And she was horrified by the amount of input and unsolicited advice. opinions and pressure that were just coming from all angles.

You know, she was like, when I brought you up, you maybe had one or two books, one of which you'd throw across the room. And, you know, maybe you'd ring your own mum up and say, oh, the baby's doing this. You know, what do I do? But you didn't have this kind of bombardment of information. And I think that's, you know, that's one of the things I've tried to capture in the Republic of Parenthood is how I think modern parents are really negotiating with quite a lot of pressure coming from quite a lot of different directions.

And there are things, you know, there are things that are kind of immortal that all parents have to deal with, you know. But this idea that it's all been said before, I think it changes for every single generation. And I think our generation faces, you know, a unique set of pressures. Just like previous generations had their own pressures. We have our own pressures. And one of them is the internet.

Well, Phillips discusses how the domestic space is often seen as a feminine zone, but not necessarily recognised as real work, overlooking the significance that it plays in shaping our society. And like you say, that's changed generation to generation, that domestic space takes on different connotations. Do you think we're any closer to understanding

and valuing the domestic space in 2025? Is there still a long way to go? I mean, there's always a long way to go, but I think, you know, just you look at our discussion of those brilliant women writers who write the domestic and I think in terms of fiction, it's quite interesting, Ferranti says that writing about motherhood

is still really in its infancy and I agree with that because for a long time, people just weren't interested in it. And I think we're seeing, you know, it tends to come in waves and we're seeing a new wave at the moment, a new generation kind of exploring what that means in fiction and in non-fiction and in painting and in music, you know, and it's fantastic.

But obviously there is still a long way to go because women still shoulder the burden of most domestic labour in most households. And, you know, you just look at the kind of responses to calls for six months of paternity leave in the right wing press and how they've mocked and ridiculed it. You know, that just goes to show how far we, you know, how far we need to go in terms of men being able to be there for their children as well. You know, my husband wanted to be there with his baby. and in many workplaces, men are still discouraged from taking time off or, you know, they're abnormal, they're seen as an exception rather than the rule. And I think in Britain, we have a really long way to go when you compare us to kind of Scandinavian countries, for instance.

Well, you do, you've explored so beautifully through both fiction in the books that you've brought today and nonfiction in The Baby on the Fire Escape, this theme. And your new novel as well looks at this intersection. of art and motherhood. For you personally, your journey of negotiating, of navigating that intersection, where are you now? And does it look like something that will continue to evolve? Well, I've told my husband, I'm not going to write another book for at least a year.

Okay. Because I was just like, when I finished my novel, I was just like, okay, I need to stop. And I said to him, you know, in a sort of moment of madness, I was like, maybe I'll never write another book again. maybe I'm done but you know I don't think that's going to happen

I think I'll probably go maybe not even a year and I'll start having an idea and wanting to write about it exactly exactly but yeah I feel in a good place with my work life balance my son's with me

on Mondays and Tuesdays and then for the rest of the week I either write or edit so it feels like a nice balance it'll change again when he starts school and I'll have to find a new shape to my working pattern like all mothers have to and all fathers have to.

I'm quite daunted by the prospect of school holidays. I still don't quite understand what you're supposed to do. Which is funny because looking back as a child, neither were we. No. I don't know what we were supposed to do. But I was to think six weeks of what? No child care. No, nothing.

Do I just not work, I guess? Yeah. I mean, who knows? So, yeah, I think it's a constantly shifting animal. and all you can do is find the spaces. You know, Barbara Hepworth says in the, it's quoted in the baby on the fire escape, that even if you can do half an hour a day,

and she had triplets and another child, she thought even if you can have half an hour a day to let the images grow in your mind, then that can be enough. Well, watch this space. We'll see which images grow in your mind. But in the meantime, best of luck with female nude. I do have to ask you,

if you had to choose one book, from your selection that you've brought to stay as a favourite, which would it be? And why? I think I'm going to choose the nursery. Okay. Because I think it's groundbreaking. And I think anyone who reads it will see immediately how groundbreaking it is. I think it's very early days in terms of writing about the physicality of motherhood. And I think she's achieved that brilliantly. Riannon, thank you so much. I've found this so enriching, so insightful, and I think as well for a lot of our listeners, who I know will be navigating motherhood in whatever form that might take, this will have resonated deeply.

So thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed it. I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Price for Fiction Bootschelphie podcast, brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Thank you for joining me for this episode. You'll find all the books discussed in our show notes. If you've enjoyed it, please leave us a rating or review to help other readers discover even more brilliant books by women. See you next time.