"As soon as the baby arrives all of her choices disappear"
A conversation about plot, postpartum fiction, and writing leaky tits with Szilvia Molnar, author of the novel The Nursery
Szilvia Molnar’s debut novel, The Nursery, is a little bit gothic, a little bit speculative. The visceral abjection of the postpartum period is palpable and textured, as we follow a new mother who makes an unlikely friend and tries to re-collect herself after giving birth and meeting the edges of her own madness.
One of the most radical elements of the book, however, is how it meets a central challenge writers face in depicting the experience of caring for a new baby—namely, overcoming the presumption that nothing really happens in the confines of the domestic space, that it’s not where the real action happens. The Nursery upends that assumption, taking us straight into the “horror of mundanity.” Time is a wash in the book, or at least not experienced with any sense of continuity. Sensation, however, is heightened, and hot. A lot happens, in other words, almost to much to bear.
I spoke with Szilvia about the difference between the early days with an infant and motherhood as we understand it, translation as a metaphor for invisibility, and creating plot and conflict in the home.
The Nursery was just released in paperback, and the cover image alone is reason to get yourself a copy.
I’ve been thinking lately about my hunger for writing that isn’t “about motherhood today” per se, but rather about maternal subjectivity and its unique relationship to embodiment, crisis, and revelation. Were you thinking about similar connections as you worked on the book, or would you characterize the detailed interiority that’s so central to this novel in some other way?
Yes, this is just my attempt at getting to a truth about the early days of motherhood, but I know there are hundreds of interpretations of this experience. My intention was very much to unravel the first hours and days after giving birth and describe it in a matter-of-fact way. How this is interpreted is maybe not up to me?
Sometimes I feel cheeky and want to say that the early postpartum days actually have very little to do with “motherhood” (so is my book really about motherhood?), but feel free to disagree on this idea. Anyone can change an infant’s diaper, anyone can feed an infant, hold an infant, but as soon as a woman does it - all these political factors are in play because society has these absurd expectations of how and what a new mother should feel or do. Let’s not even go into the “performance” of motherhood that is expected of women… So, I just wanted to describe what this sudden change and these actions can do to one person and their view of themselves.
Translation hangs behind the book with kind of a roving symbolism—it’s a metaphor for the work of motherhood but also the work of the author, who is documenting maternal experience. Did your professional life in publishing and translation inform your approach to motherhood in this book?
So my day job (which I’ve done for over fifteen years) is to find international publishers for the authors that are represented at the literary agency I work for. I love my job but have also viewed it as the kind of job not many know about or “see” - it sort of happens in the background and then our authors can celebrate and get excited about promoting a French or German or Bulgarian edition of their work. And many of my friends are translators so I decided to combine these two ideas - of two “invisible” jobs that are in the periphery and incorporate it into my protagonist’s life.
I turned her into a person who has been quite content and happy with doing her own thing in the background of everything else that’s going on (in the big city where she lives) - being more of an observer, and having a love for language, but this feeling changes so drastically as soon as the baby arrives. I wanted her to wrestle with the idea of trying to figure out where her voice, language and agency was or could be, after such a big change.
Also, as soon as the baby arrives all of her choices disappear. She has to submit fully to Button [the baby] who is 100% reliant on her for their survival and here is where some of the conflict presented itself in the story.
This book is also highly charged with the sting of constant touch and nonstop demands on the maternal body. There’s one scene in which the mother is handing the baby off to John, her husband; the baby is startled by John’s penis, which I really only mention because it’s such a wonderfully funny body moment. After the penis, though, we get a good sense of how the mother’s body is tapped: she retreats into the bathroom, and we’re witness to how, unlike John, she can’t just leave the baby behind. The baby cries for her, and her body is riddled with remnants of it—throbbing breasts, leaking nipples, stretched stomach, tape marks from the epidural, everything that’s going on between her legs.
Can you share a bit about how you wrote into this experience of the maternal body? (I noticed the note to your editor in the acknowledgments about getting the leaky tits right, and I just really want to be part of that conversation.)
Haha yes there were so many pages of lactating tits here and there that I confused myself from time to time! And thankfully my editors steered me the right way.
It was certainly a fine balance between wanting to be pretty accurate when it comes to the postpartum experience, keeping in mind the sequence of things as time is passing - how the milk comes in, what the infant’s poo looks or smells like, how long vaginal stitches take to dissolve - but I also wanted to take some liberty in adding some fantastical elements. And since the protagonist is so sleep deprived I could play around with time because she’s not always sure what happens when.
But yes, I also wanted the book to be heavy with bodily descriptions and experiences in order to indicate what kind of emotions this gives our protagonist. And provoke the reader with explicit scenes because I had never seen it depicted in literature before.
Were there craft issues that came up for you as you built this mundane domestic setting? How were you thinking about creating a sense of plot and movement?
The very first pages actually separated the “before” time where our narrator gives birth and “after” the arrival of the baby and it was my agent (Kate Johnson @ Wolf Lit) who suggested we should braid these two time lines together, which was a brilliant idea. Although, I definitely remember thinking that it would be impossible to pull off. I guess I was up for torturing myself in this writing process.
I went through about 50 drafts before I understood the full framing of the story and then I had to make sure each chapter built towards the next. It felt more like I was building a sculpture that had to stand up straight once I was finished with it.
Related to this, one of my favorite elements of the book is how the writing performs the “elasticity of time” that one is subject to when caring for a new baby— placing this experience of time (sometimes quite explicitly) in contrast to the temporality of the epic or other traditional literary structures. How were you thinking about time in this book?
Lastly, this book explores the proximity of motherhood to violence—both the fear of it emerging outside us, endangering our children, and the closeted fear of our capacity to cause pain. How do you think about the possibilities of exploring the darker parts of the maternal psyche in fiction?
It’s a fascinating subject matter that has endless possibilities. I personally wanted to stay right behind the line of horror but not cross it. I don’t think it’s a spoiler alert that the baby is never hurt and the protagonist never hurts anyone physically - but the problem is that she is not nurtured enough so it’s her mind that takes many twists and turns.
I also wasn’t fully aware (it’s not really mentioned in the books unless you go look for it!) that childbirth can rekindle all kinds of trauma but once I felt some of that personally, I became very interested in trying to explain it on the page and figure out a way to make it interesting in fiction. Once I knew I wanted to write this novel, there also came this huge urge to create a story that could help other people feel seen and understood in their own trauma or loss or grief.
I also just have to mention: I wrote these questions while on a plane next to a couple with a two year old daughter who must have said “more milky mama” 1000 times over the course of our three-hour flight, just the way my daughter used to say it. Felt apt.
They always want more! Who can blame them.
One of the things I'm looking forward to writing into in my own book is the experience of labor as a huge trigger for reliving trauma, which literally no one gave me even a glimmer of expectation about. From my first contraction I just left my body.
On the list of psychological symptoms that I exhibit, pathological denial isn't generally on the list, but it was that day. I told myself I wasn't in labor for 19 straight hours, until I was 9 cm dilated. It was the most crazy pants I have ever been. But then, why wouldn't having something that painful, intimate, and out of my control happening to my body not trigger that sort of response, given a lifetime history of sexual trauma?