A complicated look at motherhood

Lucy Ellmann has a lot to say. In Ducks, Newburyport, her 1,034-page novel, Ellmann’s narrator, an Ohio housewife, lets loose an encyclopedic monologue that encompasses modern motherhood; the American health care system; Trump; and other subjects.

Ducks, Newburyport has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; other finalists include Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie. From her home in Scotland, the 62-year-old novelist offers some insights on her book.

Your narrator is a mother of four who runs a small baking business and sometimes breaks into song but rarely stops to catch her breath. What is she trying to tell us?

She’s not trying to tell you anything; she’s just going about her business. Ducks, Newburyport doesn’t yank at a reader’s coat tails like The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (a book I love). Its approach is oblique, and it’s up to the reader to make head or tail of it.   

You have’ny lived in the US since you were a teen. And yet you chose to write in the voice of an American housewife and entrepreneur. Why – and how – did you summon that voice?

She’s not an “entrepreneur”, more like a beggar who’s just trying to make ends meet (the family has been crippled by health-care costs). The narrator is, in some ways, the person I might have been, had I never moved to Europe. I have family in America, and dear friends. The country’s fate concerns me. And from the outside the horrors are blatant. It is an obtuse entity, endangering the whole world. 

Your book offers a complicated look at motherhood. At one point your narrator says, “I’m scared of all young women now, because when I look at them I see another potential mother-hater.” What are you trying to say about how society — and women in particular — view motherhood?

I’m stunned by how harshly many daughters treat their mothers these days. This is gratingly anti-feminist, a self-perpetuating cycle of self-hatred, whereby these girls in turn will be scorned by their daughters. The devaluing of motherhood, though, is essential to patriarchy. Our society neglects mothers (practically and emotionally) and even the notion of motherhood. This all serves misogyny extremely well. Not all women are mothers, luckily — what is the point of bearing children, after all, in such a world? But contempt for motherhood surges up from a well of disparagement of women in general, and the whole history of womanhood, a disparagement of life itself.

I have infinite respect for motherhood as a fact, an astounding fact throughout human history and the natural world. It’s hard not to believe that the perspective of mothers is more rational and more considerate than many other perspectives. I agree with Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who said only nursing mothers should have control over nuclear bombs. If it had been up to mothers, though, bombs would never have been created.

I’ve read that you are “committed to peacefully circumventing all governments in order to create a worldwide matriarchy in which women, art and animals will be honoured, instead of bombs, cigars, man caves, computers, gangster movies and garter belts”. Which thing will go first?

My plan is that men should admit culpability in ruining the world, and in reparation, hand over all their money and property to women. Whatever women do with the money, it’s got to be better than what men spent it on. Once all wealth is in female hands, women can start sorting out the criminal catastrophe men have perpetrated. Advances in metallurgy sparked the demise of matriarchy in the first place, 5,000 years ago, leading to a growth of weaponry and war. You can still see the link between weapons and misogyny today, in the number of American women shot by gun-toting men. So maybe we’ll start by banning metal. Also porn. But men can still have beer. — The Independent