9 Books About Haunted Motherhood

Being a mother, for me, has had the effect of raising the ceiling on most feelings. My children (now eleven and seven years old) have carried me to new heights of hilarity and joy, but in the midst of these feelings I’m aware too of their corollary: the understanding, which arrived suddenly right after each of their births, that I’d made a terribly risky bargain, bringing into my life something whose loss I’m not sure I would be able to bear. There’s an almost supernatural quality to this state, the way it involves living inside two extremes at once. And when I set out to capture this feeling in my new novel, The Garden , I found that the supernatural was one of the best tools available to me. My novel is set at an isolated hospital, a former country estate, in the late 1940s, where a husband and wife doctor team is trying out an experimental cure for repeated miscarriage—and where Irene Willard, their desperate but reluctant patient, discovers an abandoned walled garden with its own strange powers. As the doctors’ plans begin to go wrong, Irene finds herself gripped by hauntings that blur the line between external and internal. At its thematic core, The Garden is about pregnancy as a haunted house, an inner and outer ghost story. The books on this list were my lodestars as I undertook this project—but more importantly as I have undertaken the project of living inside the wonderful, unlivable bargain of motherhood itself. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman A motherhood-as-ghost-story urtext, The Yellow Wallpaper is an 1892 short story with a nonfictional seed (and a real-life agenda): Gilman’s desire to bring awareness to the horrors of the rest cure, which she experienced after the birth of her daughter. The story’s narrator, suffering a “nervous depression” after her son’s birth, has been confined by her husband to her room and prevented from using her mind, or doing much of anything, in an effort to cure her and equip her to be a good mother to her “dear baby.” She’s helpless […]

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