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Mother Ship by Francesca Segal review – a moving story about motherhood

A remarkable memoir-diary about giving birth to premature twins is also a love letter to solidarity

In October 2015, the novelist Francesca Segal met her 10-week premature twin daughters for the first time. The intensive care soundtrack was “a combination of control tower, server room and a busy canteen”. Her doll-sized daughters were too fragile for clothes so she found them naked, curled face down in oval nests of towels. When she peered at their faces, she saw little cloth hats and white Velcro sunglasses, their noses and mouths obscured by breathing masks and feeding tubes. For a few more days, their faces remained “a secret known only to each other” and she was unable to touch them. “They are half-beings in the half-light and in an instant my heart shatters, and I become half a mother, twice.”

This is the reality of early motherhood for 100,000 women in the UK each year and it’s a story that, despite the recent plethora of literature about motherhood, has rarely been told by a British mother (in the US there’s Vicki Forman’s This Lovely Life). Segal is the right person to do it. She writes with delicate eloquence, combining passion and comic understatement so deftly that this feels the only way the book could have been written. Lyricism is undercut by everyday dialogue or WhatsApp messages and marshalled into a startlingly dramatic structure. Even if we know that the babies survive, there’s something about the pacing that means we don’t quite believe it during each moment of danger. Both babies develop life-threatening infections and one is diagnosed with necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), which has a survival rate of below 50%. I don’t think I’ve turned the pages so urgently in a book about motherhood before.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2WcYMrc
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