Our Soldier’s Song: A Guest Post by Claire Kilroy
This is a stark exploration of early motherhood — the responsibilities, the emotional bonds and how becoming a mom changes everything. Tethering between emotional bliss and suppressed resentment, this is a visceral dive that’s moving, funny and eye-opening. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Claire Kilroy on writing Solider Sailor.
Paperback $17.99
Soldier Sailor: A Novel
Soldier Sailor: A Novel
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Paperback $17.99
Award-winning author Claire Kilroy’s “lyrical and incisive” (The New York Times Book Review) novel that reads with the pace of a thriller and is filled with astute and witty observations of life with a young child.
Award-winning author Claire Kilroy’s “lyrical and incisive” (The New York Times Book Review) novel that reads with the pace of a thriller and is filled with astute and witty observations of life with a young child.
I wouldn’t say I wanted to write this novel. I wanted to write my old novels, I wanted to be the old me. Before becoming a mother, I thought you could write whilst caring for a baby –typing one-handed or rocking the cradle with your foot. Ideology had taught me that raising a child was adjacent to the real business of career.
Then I had a baby and discovered that raising a child is the real business. It is life and death. You cannot lower your guard. The magnitude of this work has been belittled because it is traditionally women who do it.
When I finally made it back to my laptop (first: get a job to pay for childcare) my staggering revelation was that I was no longer me. I was just this woman talking to her kid all day. So I sat there and talked to my kid on the page. I cried and I wrote, I wrote and I cried, writing and crying – crying – and Soldier Sailor gradually emerged.
I anticipated a backlash for portraying negatives as well as positives – mothers in the playground had moved away if I broached the topic of struggle. I thought I knew loneliness: I was a writer. I thought I knew failure: I was an Irish writer (“Fail again. Fail better” – that was us.) I concluded that it was just me making a bags of it because I was impractical and incompetent. “You should have married a nurse!” I would yell at my husband whenever things went wrong. Nurses were capable and dealt with people in extremis and did not get in a flap. They didn’t grieve the loss of their old selves, or fail to get their baby from A to B on time, or resent their husbands like it was a competitive sport. Nurses got shit done.
Instead of a backlash, people have thanked me. Mothers, yes, as well as people who have mothers. Several women have simply cried because it’s that overwhelming, being responsible 24/7 for a beloved new life. I recall one woman who kept peering around the edge of the signing tent to see how my line was progressing. When the last book was signed, she sidled up with her copy and told me her story, which was that she used to be a nurse, an intensive care nurse. She was the best intensive care nurse in the hospital. If a patient came in completely fucked up, she told me, she was the one they called. The more fucked up those patients were, she was like: send me. If anyone could get those poor people through, it was her.
But then she had kids and couldn’t do it anymore. Motherhood had floored her too.
I loved that woman. She felt like a messenger from an underground revolution, dispatched to assure me that I wasn’t the one who had failed, and that she wasn’t the one who had failed either. The patriarchy had failed us. Here is our soldier’s song.