In Retrospect: A Guest Post by Emma Knight
A sharp coming-of-age journey set in a glamorous world of high academia, old money and one eccentric upper-class family. Read on for Emma Knight’s exclusive guest post on writing our latest Book Club pick, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus.
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
By Emma Knight
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Hardcover
$26.00
$29.00
A witty, atmospheric, and brilliantly told novel that offers compelling portraits of womanhood, motherhood and female friendship, along with the irresistible intrigue surrounding an extraordinary British family
A witty, atmospheric, and brilliantly told novel that offers compelling portraits of womanhood, motherhood and female friendship, along with the irresistible intrigue surrounding an extraordinary British family
I began writing The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus soon after becoming a mother. An absurd idea, in retrospect. To wait until my brain felt like a wedge of Jarlsberg, until I was on an emotional elevator with broken buttons, until my time no longer belonged to me, to do the thing that I have always most wanted to do.
But that was what it took, in my case. It took first one, and then two tiny aliens arriving on this planet via the ship that is me, looking up at me with eyes that seemed to be asking, who are you, and what is the nature of your business here?
It took the adrenaline high, the relief, and the hubris of having survived the commonplace magic trick of life creation to admit to myself what the nature of my business on this earth really was.
When it comes to writing, the barrier to entry is deceptively low. You don’t need a huge slab of rock. You don’t need an orchestra, a corps de ballet, or even paints and brushes. What you do need, as Virginia Woolf rightly pointed out, is money from another source and a place to sit.
I would add that you need confidence. Confidence enough to work alone for many years on something that is visible only to you, at the expense of other valuable and expected activities. To try to capture the thing in your mind with just words, and then, one day, to invite other people to see what you’ve done.
I belong, on both sides of my family, to a long line of writers who lacked the materials. My maternal grandmother, to whom this novel is dedicated, would have loved to have written. And she had stories. But she bore six children, beginning at age twenty-one. There was very little money, there was no room of her own, and with an eighth-grade education, where would she have found the confidence?
Advantaged beyond her wildest dreams, I don’t always have it, either. It helped that after my daughters were born, the stakes that had seemed to exist before collapsed in a heap. Humiliation looks different after pregnancy and childbirth. And the intense feeling of being uniquely, overwhelmingly bad at everything that matters that is one of the markers of parenthood made my fear of not being good enough silly. Because even a truly awful novel won’t ruin anyone’s life. But a bad mother…?
In their place, new stakes arose. How can I show my daughters who I really am if I’m pretending to be someone else? And how can I tell them it’s up to them to choose how they want to be in this world if I don’t at least try do the same?
So here I am, trying, and it feels like letting go of a tightly held secret. Terrifying, exhilarating, right.
