Chloë Ashby’s thoughtful second novel focuses on fertility and the choices women in their thirties routinely face over motherhood. Cathy, the heroine, is married to Noah, who is around a decade older and has decided he doesn’t want children.
Mothers are everywhere in this book. There is Cathy’s best friend, her sister-in-law and her own widowed mother, Janey. Janey lives alone in Norfolk while Cathy – her only child – is in London; she appears to be slipping into dementia and this story line forms the other main strand of Second Self. Ashby implies that some of Cathy’s indecision over motherhood relates to the effective loss of her own mother to old age and disease.
Ashby writes with great fluency and is very confident in her evocations of Cathy and Noah’s middle-class milieu of Ottolenghi takeaways and almond bellinis. For all Cathy’s material comfort, however, this is not a smug novel, or a satire on smugness. There is plenty to fear here: infant mortality, Alzheimer’s, marital breakdown, ageing, death.
