Writing in the [London] Sunday Times, India Knight analyzes ‘When the Bough Breaks: A Mother’s Story,’ currently the fifth-highest selling biography on the UK Amazon website. The book is a memoir by opera director Julia Hollander that details her decision to put her brain-damaged baby daughter Imogen in foster care. Knight is the mother of a child with a disability. Her website is here.

An excerpt:

… in my opinion Hollander is a person in pain seeking public atonement by using “honesty” as a bogus and self-deluded way of achieving it. She is promoting her book, making money and garnering idiotically misplaced media sympathy for her “bravery” and “honesty” from people who haven’t a clue what they’re talking about and care more about the “rights” of women to feel joyous at all times than about pathetically vulnerable babies. Hollander has returned to her arty middle-class lifestyle in leafy Oxfordshire with her other “normal”, photogenic children.

That is her choice but to present it as being in any way “brave” is insane. It is selfish and self-serving and monstrous. Bravery is picking yourself up and getting on with it; bravery is the lioness instinct to defend your vulnerable child with your life – and, if needs be, your sanity. Bravery is dumping the loser husband who’s taken to eating separately because he can’t cope. Bravery isn’t pretending that the inconvenient truth never happened.

… It’s not a fashionable thing to say but motherhood is about sacrifice and duty. It’s about understanding that you will no longer be able to put yourself first and understanding that there isn’t a personality type that “copes” with difficulty or disability better than anyone else.

… Anyone who feels unable to grasp this should get their tubes tied, pronto. And Hollander should give up writing books, stop pretending that everything’s fine and get the help she so clearly needs.

Related story in the [UK] Guardian: A tale of two mothers

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, books, brain damage, cerebral palsy, commentary, epilepsy, families, first-person, public attitudes, stereotypes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post