Bad Mad Mommy

Sheerly Avni reviewed Adrienne Martini’s book, Hillbilly Gothic, in the Chronicle. I’m curious:

“My family has a grand tradition. After a woman gives birth, she goes mad.” So opens journalist, mother and intermittently insane memoirist Adrienne Martini’s “Hillbilly Gothic.” It is a promising opening line for a book that is also a worthy endeavor. Part family history, part confessional, part Sedaris-style comedy routine in which Martini uses her mental instability as material, the book tries to do something necessary: dispel the cloud of shame still hanging over mental illness, postpartum depression and psychosis in particular.

While postpartum depression and psychosis always deserve more airtime, I get the sense that Martini is trying to dispel a more general phenomenon as well: the cloud of shame hanging over mothers who are not maternal. She’s writing for mothers who require care and support themselves, and for mothers whose bonds with their children are complicated. That is, all mothers. Martini is to the myth of motherhood as Gerald Ensley is to the myth of the able body. All mothers are exhausted, lonely, isolated, sick, miserable, and in pain sometimes. All mothers feel burdened, angry, uncharitable, bored, and downright hateful. All mothers, being human, feel a kind of love towards their children that does not match the inhuman ideal personified by the perfect mother. Martini–lucky her–is stuck at the intersection of an erroneously vaunted condition and an erroneously stigmatized one, but the poor fit of her personality and circumstances and that standard is universal.

Apparently, it’s kind of a twee book:

That essay is a delightful read, episodic and witty, but its breezy newsprint tone wears thin stretched over 221 pages. Jocularity as a defense against pain only works if you are very, very funny, a Sedaris, a Burroughs, a Woody Allen. Martini is none of these, and too often, her jokes fall painfully flat: Fourteenth century madwoman Marjorie Kempe was “one enchilada short of a combo plate.” The word doula sounds like “something you’d order in a Greek restaurant,” and, of course, body image wit flows long: “Like cellulite,” she tells us, “dreams come easily.” Occasionally, she scores (“I can’t be crazy,” she tells one of the doctors, in one of the book’s best asides, “I’ve read ‘Infinite Jest’!”), but for the most part, one feels less like an entertained reader than a beleaguered psychiatrist, begging a defensive patient to stop wisecracking and get to the story.

Although I wonder if some of this breeziness is because of the fear of stigma. Martini could be attempting to make her case with humor because she’s afraid to make people think that there but for the grace of God goes another Andrea Yates. You can see Avni using a little of the same phrasing to introduce the crazy mommy’s memoir and the topic of unpleasant pregnancy. It sounds interesting all the same, and a breezy newsprint tone is probably just the thing for a Vicodin trance.