‘The Unfamiliar’: Queer Motherhood and Memoir with Kirsty Logan
Interviewed by Megan Willis
Kirsty Logan is the author of the novels Now She is Witch, The Gracekeepers and The Gloaming, the short story collections Things We Say In The Dark, A Portable Shelter and The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales, and the short memoir The Old Asylum in the Woods at the Edge of the Town Where I Grew Up. Her books have won the LAMBDA Literary Award, the Polari First Book Prize, the Saboteur Award, the Scott Prize and the Gavin Wallace Fellowship.
Her latest book, The Unfamiliar, is an unconventional, unexpectedly funny, brutally honest memoir about infertility, pregnancy and motherhood. The book challenges our assumptions about pregnancy, gender roles, queer identity and what it means to be a parent.
Can you tell me about how you came to write the book?
When I first started working on this book, which took about six years from start to finish, my plan was to write about being the non-birth mother. My wife was going to carry the baby; I didn’t particularly want to be pregnant. My wife unfortunately suffered miscarriages, and then we did IVF, which didn’t work. The doctors eventually said that if all we wanted was a child, we should consider, well, he didn’t say back-up womb, but the implication was to use the back-up womb, which was me. It became a book about being… not a reluctant mother, as I did want to be a mother, but a book about when the journey doesn’t go the way that you think it will.
A lot of it is about anxiety and mental health, and wanting to be honest and show people that you don’t have to pretend that everything is easy. Every single day of my pregnancy I was convinced that the baby was going to die. I thought, am I just extremely morbid? But the more I spoke to people, the more they said they had felt that and had those thoughts too. The baby dying, them dying. A lot of people experience it and just don’t talk about it. And I thought I’d just be honest about how chaotic life is. If a human life is going to ruin my navel, I might as well gaze at it!
How did you settle on the title, The Unfamiliar?
I had just finished Now She Is Witch, so I was very interested in this idea of a witch’s familiar. And although pregnancy is ‘natural’, I had never felt so fantastical in the old sense of the word, like a mythical beast. It’s so surreal. How many people is a pregnant person? One? Two? The day that the baby was born was the first time we met, which is so strange to think since they grew inside my body. It’s intimate yet estranged.
I also like the play on the word family. Queer families are equally valid to cisgendered, hetero nuclear families, but they’re also different, which is why I initially wanted to write a book about being a non-birth mother. It’s a unique position. There’s no word for it. We have stepmother and adopted mother. But what would I have been? Non-birth mother? It’s slightly awkward, and you’re defined then by what you are not. It’s not the same as being an adopted mother or a father, and it is different than being the birth mother – not lesser in any way, but a different experience. So yeah, a lot of tedious wordplay with the title! I liked that it had a lot of different meanings.
In your fiction, you gravitate toward the supernatural and horror. Did you find that too in writing your motherhood memoir?
I’m a gothic and horror girlie, that’s my thing, and I think childbirth is the most gothic thing that I have ever done. I had a terrible birth, I’ll just say, and while we make it alive through an experience and we don’t have lasting physical damage, we don’t have to pretend everything is ok. Although I don’t wake up in a cold sweat thinking about it anymore, it’s okay to acknowledge it was difficult. Quite soon after the birth, even though it was hard, I was messaging the group chat telling my friends about it and making it funny. They were sending me these emojis back about it with blood emojis and stuff. And I thought, we make our experiences stories to cope.
Writing memoir, in a way, means reliving traumatic moments. How do you take care of your mental health?
The birth scene was written in one big session when the baby was about six months old. I did have to keep getting up and breaking away from it. I kept all that stuff about struggling in – I wanted to give the reader a moment and remind them that it did work out ok. But then I did want to keep bringing them back because I couldn’t escape when I was going through it the first time.
I was aware that I wouldn’t come across as particularly likeable in the book, and I had to be willing to not be liked. The most important thing in the world, in particular for a queer person and in particular for a woman, should never be to be likeable. At certain points, I didn’t like myself. I was very bitter and angry because of the way that I was dealing with various things that were happening. I don’t think we’re designed to cope with the level of pain and trauma that birth brings.
The me in the book is real – everything that happened in the book is real – but it’s not the entirety of me, it couldn’t possibly be that. I just had to remember that the people who actually know me still love me. Anyone who wants to write something like this that is very difficult and raw, just remember that.
When you are writing memoir, how do you navigate including the experiences of others?
Legally, everyone who is mentioned in the book had to sign something to say they were happy with it and weren’t going to sue me. Ethically, I made sure that nothing in the book was going to be a surprise to anyone. For instance, any private emotional response to a situation, I discussed with the person involved before including it.
The one section that I write about where I wasn’t present is when my wife was getting IVF. Because of covid lockdown, I couldn’t go and be there with her and she had to do that by herself. She always says about the birth that I was so brave and so strong, but she was with me the whole time! Although she isn’t a writer, she has a very writerly, visual way of describing things, like the long white corridors in the hospital with the brightly coloured Crocs sitting outside them (these are sterile rooms so the nurses and doctors would change their shoes before going into each room), and I loved the image of that.
Funnily enough, she didn’t read the book before it was published. I gave her lots of opportunities. I asked if it was because it was difficult, and she said no, it was just that it was my version. She has her own story of this entire journey. It overlaps with mine a lot, but it’s not the same. Her experience in her body, in her emotions, and in her life was different than my experience. She has listened to it now that the audiobook is out though – she likes to listen to my audiobooks. Who knows, maybe one day she’ll do her side of the story, which I would love to read.
There are moments in the book where you self-edit and others where you go through old notes and don’t remember experiencing what you’ve written down. With things like editing for readability and how unreliable memory itself can be, how truthful do you think memoir is?
Although what I’ve written about aren’t my literal real-life experiences, I feel a lot rawer and more revealed by my novels. With non-fiction, there is no fear of being unmasked because you’ve already put it all out there. You’re always told when writing memoir to have distance from it. I think that’s good advice, but that’s not what I did. I took extensive notes before and throughout my pregnancy. The birth was an emergency C-section under general anaesthetic. I woke up with this tiny little newborn baby in the maternity ward, it’s 4 am, and I’m typing notes on my phone about the birth to try and remember it. We are wired to forget, especially experiences like birth.
About a lot of things in the book, I wonder, do I remember them genuinely or am I remembering the version that I wrote? I think all memoirists aim for truth, but that doesn’t mean that it’s all ‘true’ in the way that many of us would define it. In the end, we are as honest as we can be.