| After sharing their artistic frustrations at the school gate, Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell decide to take a risk: to co-write a book about early motherhood. Off-colour, offbeat, off their heads, they begin - but then, what is motherhood if not messy, non-linear, multi-authored and potty mouthed? What results is songs, memoir, fiction, drama, poetry, letters, pregnant and lactating AI assistants texting each other. Together, Dovey and Bell create a collage of absurd mothering, failing mothering and moving mothering. They salvage the scraps of each other's lives to imagine themselves into a future where women don't always have to choose between Art and Motherhood. After all: these mothers are tired. They are busy. They are lucky. They talk. Perform. Categorise. Clown. They do sad dinner cabaret. They do heroic odyssey. They do motherhood the musical. They do it badly, they do it well, they do it and they do it, and they keep on doing it as women do: comically, communally, creatively. No bells and whistles, no false cheer. Motherhood as a fever-dream fantasia, a poker-faced, tragic extravaganza. Funny, thoughtful, vulnerable and disturbingly familiar, Mothertongues up-ends a genre and speaks motherhood anew. |
