Second Self by Chloe Ashby

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.

Unpacking the motherhood debate

Since Rachel Cusk’s ground-breaking memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, was published in 2001, books about the reality of motherhood have proliferated. Recently, however, the subject of whether to become a mother or not at all has been foregrounded in fiction. Cusk’s book, in her own words, “set out to describe the physical events of childbirth and early motherhood” and she was castigated for it — with one reviewer suggesting that if everyone read her book, the propagation of the human race would basically end as it made the whole business sound so unpleasant.

“Complaining” about motherhood is now commonplace, as it should be — from Mumsnet talk forums to bestselling fiction. Claire Kilroy’s coruscating novel Soldier Sailor (2023) is possibly the most striking new example: the narrator briefly leaves her newborn son in a forest glade after a vitriolic row with her husband. She believes she is protecting her child from the bleakness she feels inside by abandoning him, albeit temporarily.

(c) Ben Bailey Smith