Normal Women: From the Number One Bestselling Author Comes 900 Years of Women Making History

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They committed crimes or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things, and rioted.

Back home in Metcalf — which has, in the years since she left home, become a “hub” for tech start-ups and think tanks and, therefore, commercial developers like Clark — Dani begins to feel that motherhood has plucked at something ominous within her, a suspicion that threatens to unravel Dani’s understanding of who she is and was supposed to be: “Marriage and children, the two most powerful cultural currents for women, the two things they’re trained from birth to desire more than anything else, were, in fact, destroying them. What I would have rather seen from this book, is another 200 or so pages where the story is free to devolve into fully unhinged woman territory.

Works that have been adapted for television include A Respectable Trade, The Other Boleyn Girl and The Queen's Fool. This book is billed as a literary mystery, but it is absolutely not a mystery as Renata, who goes missing, is gone for about 0. Her days feel directionless, full of budding momfluencer friends who she is unsure if she even enjoys, and trying to win a battle with her husband about who will learn to use the espresso machine.

Fierce and unexpected, this darkly comedic horror is an exploration of how we haunt ourselves and how we allow others to haunt us, especially those closest to us. And the girlies are already doing the mental gymnastics and are like we agree, that makes perfect sense. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency, and built ships, corn mills and houses. Like Mona Awad’s Bunny or Otessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Motherthing is a fabulous, frightening story built from fine, fine prose.

In this post-partum affogato-obsessed novel, Hogarth explores stay at home moms, sex work, and hating men.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. In fact, after reading book after book about the connection between fear and pain, the orgasmic, ecstatic, rapturous birth experience, the power of visualizations — I am petals unfurling, I am huge, I am opening wide as a cave, exactly as I should, for my baby to spill without pain — one might even come to the conclusion that the body is only mysterious as it pertains to childbirth. I’d registered lots of love for Ainslie Hogarth’s Mothering but hadn’t got around to reading it which also made me keen. So far, so good, although somewhat depressing, but the plot woven around Renata’s disappearance peters out in rather implausible manner. Thanks to her husband’s promotion, Dani is back in Metcalf somewhat unwillingly but knowing she doesn’t have a choice.

I loved Motherthing but I just didn't get this one, I love the writing and the unhinged anticipation of the character and plot but I kept waiting for it to go somewhere, but for me it fell flat. Cause nothing says maybe my husband isn’t a “bad, bad man” like him wanting her to be the girlboss in charge of the corporate sex work center. In contrast to Anya, a “Normal Woman” who was “the portrait of self-care, a pursuit the mothers in the online mom forums held sacred, and another maternal obligation for all but the lucky few to fail at spectacularly,” the protagonist considers herself capable of something more than boozy backyard brunches and poop talk.