Motherhood in fiction, memoir and on the analyst's couch
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2018
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Writers Sheila Heti, Jessie Greengrass and Jacqueline Rose compare notes on motherhood & presenter Anne McElvoy looks at depictions of Mrs Noah with New Generation Thinker Daisy Black.
Jacqueline Rose has written Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. Her previous books include Women in Dark Times
Sheila Heti's latest book is called Motherhood. Her previous books include How Should a Person Be? and Women in Clothes.
Jessie Greengrass' novel, Sight, has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018.
Daisy Black, Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton, is one of the ten academics selected as New Generation Thinkers for 2018 in the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to help academics turn their research into radio programmes.
Producer: Fiona McLean
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | Hello, I'm Anne McHawoy. |
| 0:34.1 | Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion program, bringing together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate. If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe. Search for the Arts and Ideas podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do rate and and review us it'll help other people to find us |
| 0:55.6 | this is the BBC hello today we're looking at mothers and motherhood the mother and her child |
| 1:07.2 | the mother and her mother the mother in our our times. Are we modern mother carriages, |
| 1:13.1 | or a scapegoat for familial and broader failings? When I was younger, thinking about whether I |
| 1:19.5 | wanted to have children, I always came back to this formula. If no one had told me anything |
| 1:24.6 | about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. |
| 1:30.5 | I would have invented sex, friendships, art. |
| 1:33.1 | I would not have invented child rearing. |
| 1:36.7 | So, says the central character in Sheila Hetty's new novel. |
| 1:40.1 | She's with me, along with the academic and author Jacqueline Rose, whose new book focuses on mothers, love and cruelty. |
| 1:44.2 | The novelist, Jessie Greengrass, and our new generation thinker, Daisy Black. |
| 1:48.9 | To start us off, it would be very good to hear you all pick one image of motherhood, |
| 1:54.0 | past or present, personal or wider, would you think summarises the state? |
| 1:59.5 | Jacqueline. |
| 2:00.7 | Well, it has to be for me, Liberale de Veronaise's Renaissance image of the baby |
| 2:05.9 | suckling at the mother's breast. |
| 2:08.1 | And I know that's esoteric. |
| 2:10.0 | But the reason for that is that it is of such sensuousness, |
... |
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