Inferno
Bloomsbury, $23.99 pb, 272 pp
Inferno by Catherine Cho
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.
Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to contact us.