Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Paloma Faith’s take on what it means to be a woman is gritty, funny and freeing. She holds nothing back as she tells the story of what it took to get where she is (or was at the time she wrote this book).
Her words resonated with me deeply — and I think it will resonate with many women.
She tells a raw, honest story about her health experiences, troubles with conceiving, experiences in life and being a working mum. She also talks about her class journey and how that shaped her as a person.
I think she voices a lot of things many of us (women) feel.
I like that, while the book is by and large about motherhood, it isn’t focused on how often women actually mother in many areas of their lives through in a guise of people pleasing and nurturing nature in their relationships with men, friendships and families (as the discourse around mothering often is).
Instead, she talks about her specific experience with wanting to become and being a mother, and how she fits all the pieces of her life together.
Fine, her job is a lot more public than most of ours, but she still spins a relatable story about what it is to be a woman in an industry that isn’t designed for women to really exist in, how a drive to please can be incredibly detrimental and how human it is to run away from the hard feelings into more immediate stressors, like work.
She is open about how the journey of motherhood is a kind of losing yourself and then finding yourself again on the other side, the same you yet changed in irrevocable ways. And she writes beautifully about how she found a way to retain the woman in her even after becoming a mum.
She reads the audiobook herself, and it’s like listening to your older sister giving you sage advice and validating the feelings you feel, but have no words for. She tells us about the ways in which she’s grown and how her view on herself has evolved.
The tone is more mature and more feminist than Women Don’t Owe You Pretty, which (for me) fell more on the performative side of feminism.
Paloma isn’t afraid to get gritty and spill all the gory (yes, miscarriages and health issues and all) details about what it’s like to exist in the world as a woman, how women’s health is dismissed, how we’ve internalised the misogyny ourselves, and how we can still be beautiful even when broken.
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