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Inferno by Catherine Cho

by
August 2020, no. 423

Inferno by Catherine Cho

Bloomsbury, $23.99 pb, 272 pp

Inferno by Catherine Cho

by
August 2020, no. 423

Catherine Cho’s Inferno is the first ‘motherhood memoir’ I have read since reading Maria Tumarkin’s essay ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ in Dangerous Ideas About Mothers (2018). The topic of motherhood has been ‘overly melded’ to memoiristic writing, Tumarkin argues; it feels ‘too much like a foregone conclusion’.

This tendency to squeeze stories about motherhood into a pre-existing narrative form is driven partly by marketplace – by assumptions about what kind of books people want to read about and by mothers – and both derives from and perpetuates deeply held ideas about what mothers have to say, and what kinds of stories and ideas we want to hear from them.

Caitlin McGregor reviews 'Inferno' by Catherine Cho

Inferno

by Catherine Cho

Bloomsbury, $23.99 pb, 272 pp

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