World's Best Mother

February 15, 2021
An autobiographical novel about motherhood by a Spanish journalist and fiction writer. The narrator was in her 30s when she decided she wanted to become a mother. After several years and multiple rounds of IVF treatments, she achieved her goal--and found herself ambivalent about the result. She discovered, for example, that motherhood is time consuming and doesn't leave room for much more, especially when children are very small. She struggled with breastfeeding and baby-wearing. Much of what she describes will be familiar to many mothers, as well as to anyone who has read about motherhood. The narrator doesn't seem to have thought about motherhood until she became a mother herself, and she writes as if she is just discovering motherhood as a social construct. It's possible that this is a matter of cultural difference--this book certainly made a splash in Spain--but American readers interested in critical takes on motherhood are unlikely to find much new here. When Labari is actually inventive, she is often bewildering. The chapter "On Horseback or In Diapers" begins with the narrator imagining a new father going to the store to buy a superhero cape and ends as a riff on Franz Kafka's "Before the Law." In between, she muses about whether playing with dolls as a child prepared her for being a mother. Labari spends no time developing any of these disparate parts, and there is nothing essential or revealing in their juxtaposition. In another chapter, the narrator quotes Pen�lope Cruz rhapsodizing about motherhood and goes on to say of the actor that she "has quit weaving her shroud and no longer waits." Of course this is a reference to the Odyssey, but what is it supposed to mean? If there's some connection between Odysseus' wife and the star of Vicky Cristina Barcelona besides a shared name, Labari does not reveal it. The most affecting portions of the book are the ones in which the narrator describes how motherhood changed her relationships with her own mother and grandmother. These sections benefit from a simplicity and specificity most of the book lacks. Labari writes with candor, but she doesn't have much to add to the communal conversation about mothers and mothering.

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