Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Lester-Smith, Donna

The Grandmothers Are With Us: Indigenous Theoretical Perspectives Towards Healing from Family Violence

Nikki, Andrea

book reviews
 journal of the motherhood initiative             241 
porting the military regime in the Philippines through the allocation of aid 
and the military commence, such as the extraction of natural resources by 
Canadian mining companies. The state violence of the Philippine govern-
ment and the complicity of the Canadian state perpetuate the dominance of 
Canada over developing countries such as the Philippines.
This book is written primarily for an academic audience. During her field-
work, one interviewee asked whether Pratt’s research would improve the lives 
of Filipino domestic workers. I also had the same question after reading this 
book. How this book might bring about policy changes and better migrant 
women’s lives is unclear. There seems to be an unfortunate gap between 
Pratt’s belief in the need for policy changes and the limited reach of a theo-
retical book. Nonetheless, Pratt makes a significant research contribution to 
the study of migrant mothers in Canada.
Rupture
Clementine Morrigan. 
Bradford, on: Demeter Press, 2012.
Reviewed by Andrea Nikki
Rupture is a bold, honest, and thought-provoking collection of poems and 
short narrative pieces on female embodiment, violence against women, sexu-
ality, and feminism. Morrigan’s accessible language and intimate tone invite 
the reader to enter into her experiences, which range from harrowing to ex-
hilarating, and appreciate the challenging journey of the woman in patriar-
chal culture who seeks to honour her feelings, desires, and powers and carve 
out an independent existence.
The volume includes a section entitled “Rupture” which features pho-
tographs of Morrigan sitting nude in a bathtub behind a drawn curtain in 
which she expresses agony over her female embodiment. Clutching and shak-
ing her large breasts, she offers the insight that only in the seclusion of her 
private bathtub—a tiny, hidden space—can a woman safely express her full 
horror over sexual violation. Another section entitled “strange girls have feel-
ings too” includes images of pencilled self-portraits on coloured paper. These 
self-portraits couple youthful innocence with female sexuality and feminist 
resistance to effectively underscore that sexual violence against a woman is 
absolutely never her fault. 
A number of the pieces and images seek to educate readers on the so-
cial constructions of female beauty and female sexuality. For instance, in “the 
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242             volume 4,  number 1
girl with the red hair really needs to shave her fucking armpits” Morrigan 
describes an incident when her innocent love for her armpit hair was met 
with hatred and group violence: she was pulled down stairs and her head was 
struck against a pole. This piece is complemented by Morrigan’s self-portrait 
entitled “fierce femmes fuck shit up” in which her arms are raised to 
proudly display thick armpit hair alongside her long, feminine hair, a creative 
self-presentation that serves to destabilize the femme-butch dichotomy.
“bad skin: a psoriatic manifesto” is also on the theme of social control of 
the body, and claims that those with severe psoriasis are at an increased risk of 
suicide, not due to the condition itself but to the aggression and harassment 
it elicits: “your questions and your looking, they are a violence. they are an 
attempt to force my unruly body back into a tamed state. they are a demand 
that i disappear or at the very least explain myself. how dare i walk around 
with my peeling, red skin, acting like i am normal, just as human as you” 
(71). Further, “the story of my first period” relays the lonely, alienating, and 
embarrassing experience of first menstruation, an experience that is typical in 
patriarchal culture, though one that is rarely articulated in print. Morrigan 
rewrites the cultural script, and affirms menarche as an event of physical, 
spiritual, and emotional significance, finding support and strength from the 
Goddess:
i was bleeding my first blood, caught there between a twelve year 
old body and an old old man, both who laid claim to my body, who 
thought it was theirs to touch and feel … and me, inside my body, 
possessing it, bleeding my first blood, resisting … i went outside 
… i walked to the tree. i threw my arms around her… i held her 
pulsing body close to mine. i celebrated and I grieved and i gathered 
strength. i knew i was not alone. i knew She was with me.… (38) 
The concrete imagery of “yes i am a slut” posits several reasons why a wom-
an might be seen as a “slut”:
yes i am a slut. because i have big tits that pour out of pretty much 
every shirt. . . .because in grade eight a boy pulled down my shirt and 
bra in front of the whole class and my teacher and everyone saw my 
nipples. because he got a slap on the wrist and i was told by the prin-
cipal that it was partially my fault because of the shirt i was wearing 
… because when i was nineteen i was assaulted by a bunch of guys 
for not shaving my armpits they felt the need to pull my tits out of 
my shirt … because the clothes i am most comfortable in apparently 
make me a target for rape. (57-58)
book reviews
 journal of the motherhood initiative             243 
Like other feminist writers, Morrigan affirms an active female embodiment 
and frees herself from so many sexist projections: “yes i am a slut. because my 
pussy is beautiful and insatiable. because i love my body. . . .because my body 
belongs to me no matter how many times i’ve been violated and none of it 
was my fault ever” (58).
There is too little literature that explores the social mistreatment and stig-
matization of survivors of child sexual abuse, including their exploitation by 
professionals, and this reader appreciates Morrigan’s succinct exploration of 
this taboo issue in “spillllll over”:
i don’t want people telling me how damaged i am and that i need 
professional help. i am full of professional help, the good and the 
bad. i don’t want to be … a thesis statement or the proof of some-
one’s else’s point … and no, you can’t cite my sexual partners in your 
footnotes and no, you can’t define these experiences for me … i am 
not … [a] sad story about what happens when children are sexually 
abused. my promiscuity is linked to my trauma and guess what, so 
were my long, codependent monogamous relationships, but i don’t 
ever hear “you were sexually abused as a child, are you sure you’re 
not just using romance to cope?” … it’s too easy to say “oh you were 
sexually abused as a child so that’s why you are promiscuous.” it is 
too easy and it’s also just plain mean. you sound just like my abusive 
ex.… (63-64)
Rupture asserts the right of women to self-determination and shows how 
difficult it is to achieve. The volume will appeal to women readers who seek 
to challenge sexist conditioning and social norms.
An Alchemy of Mind: 
The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain
Diane Ackerman. 
New York: Scribner, 2004.
Reviewed by Csilla Toldy
Essayist and poet Diane Ackerman celebrates the human mind and brain in 
An Alchemy of Mind. As America’s best-known female naturalist she connects 


English

Rupture

O’Reilly, Andrea

“It Saved My Life”: The National Association of Mothers’ Centres, Matricentric Pedagogy and Maternal Empowerment

Gamber, Cayo

book reviews
 journal of the motherhood initiative             185 
Fatness and the Maternal Body: 
Women’s Experiences of Corporeality and the 
Shaping of Social Policy
Maya Unnithan-Kumar and Soraya Tremayne, eds. 
New York: Berghahn Books, 2011.
reviewed by cayo gamber
I had hoped this collection of eleven essays that addresses fat women’s expe-
rience of their bodies during pregnancy and the public policy that surrounds 
those bodies would offer a consistent interrogation of the certitude and circu-
lation of scientific and medical “knowledge” about obesity. The introductory 
essay by Maya Unnithan-Kumar and the final essay, “Reproducing Inequal-
ities: Theories and Ethics in Dietetics,” by Lucy Aphramor and Jacqui Gin-
gras, do address the pathologizing of fat women as obese and call for a more 
nuanced understanding of women’s experience of their corporeality. In other 
essays, however, obesity is unproblematized, as in the opening sentence of 
“The ‘Obesity Cycle’: The Impact of Maternal Obesity on the Exogenous 
and Endogenous Causes of Obesity in Offspring in the United Kingdom”: 
“Obesity is a major public health issue on an international level, and in the 
United Kingdom there are numerous ways in which governments attempt to 
prevent obesity from proliferating” (Nicole Heslehurst 111). Thus, it is not 
fully clear how these essays are in conversation with one another and how, 
collectively, they are meant to enlarge our understanding of the ways in which 
female reproduction, the medicalization of women’s bodies, and social policy 
intersect.
That said, two essays address Tuareg women whose embonpoint, whose 
rolls of fat, are seen as beautiful. The forced fattening of the women is de-
scribed in haunting detail by both authors: 
In 1982, I observed young women spending whole days with bowls 
of millet mixed with butter which they mixed into balls and then 
washed down with water, clearly forcing themselves to continue. 
Their stated aim was to get stretch marks on their thighs and stom-
achs. (Susan Randall 49) 
It is usually a descendant of iklan who fattens the young girl. This 
woman is supposed to be a “slave of origin,” in other words a slave 
with a pedigree, whose ancestors have been integrated into the fam-
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186             volume 4,  number 2
ily for several generations. Using a wooden funnel, she forces the 
girl to absorb large amounts of fresh cow’s milk, diluted with some 
plain water. She also makes the girl swallow handfuls of pounded 
raw millet (tedda). The Tuareg refer to this custom, as well as to 
the practice of fattening, as “filling” (adanay). In the beginning, the 
young girl is force-fed until she gets used to it and starts to partici-
pate routinely by lying down on her back and pulling her lips wide 
open. If she resists, the woman should not hesitate to pinch her 
or pull back her fingers, sometimes even until they break. (Saskia 
Walentowitz 76-77)
Randall and Walentowitz offer distinct, contrary readings of Tuareg wom-
en’s power. For Randall, the forced immobility of Tuareg women—an immo-
bility that is meant to aid them in maintaining their size—confines them; for 
Walentowitz, however, this same immobility ensures these women’s centrality 
to Tuareg social life.
This collection of essays offers studies on a wide array of countries: Austra-
lia, Central Niger, Ghana, India, Ireland, Northern Mali, the United King-
dom, and Tanzania. From these essays one learns that in Tanzania, “when a 
woman is pregnant, the people around her must pay no attention to her state 
and, as for herself, the future mother must protect her pregnancy from bad and 
envious looks, she must not even talk about it” (Mara Mabilia 103). In ironic 
contrast, the success of the McDonald’s chain of restaurants in India is due, 
in part, to the belief that food which “is both expensive and American … is 
perceived as healthy and good for children” (Devi Sridhar 184).
While fascinating discussions, these essays do not explicitly address women’s 
fatness and women’s maternal bodies. Rather, they discretely address women’s 
fatness or maternal bodies or potential obesity in women and children.
Bound by Love: 
Familial Bonding in Film and Television Since 1950
Laura Mattoon D’Amore, ed. 
United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.
reviewed by christine m. rohde
In Bound by Love: Familial Bonding in Film and Television Since 1950, edi-
tor Laura Mattoon D’Amore playfully dissects the representation of famil-


Fatness and the Maternal Body: Women’s Experiences of Corporeality and the Shaping of Social Policy

Grassetti, Mary T.

Navigating Academia While Balancing Motherhood: A Reflective Journey of a Circuitous Path

Quaggin Harkin, Alison

book reviews
180             volume 4,  number 2
button: ‘Puberty is when things really come to a head.’ ‘This is when things 
really get hard’” (193)—and I nodded in agreement when Lombardi discusses 
sports: “some psychologists have argued that sports provide the safest way for 
men to express their emotions in our current social climate—men can jump 
up and down in excitement, they can get tearful in victory and defeat, not 
to mention have permission to hug, smack each other’s butts, jump in piles 
on each other, and otherwise physically and emotionally connect with other 
men” (216). Lombardi suggests that “car talk” is a viable way to discuss diffi-
cult subjects with boys.
The author’s overarching message is that most women raise boys in sim-
ilar ways, but in silent and parallel universes. She depicts mothers as valu-
able and underutilized resources who can help boys become men capable of 
functioning in today’s world. Mothers also are presented as largely rational, 
thoughtful, and loving beings who feel “strongly that they [are] creating more 
sensitive, caring men for the next generation of women.” This may be a gen-
eralization, but here, for once, mothers of boys are represented positively.
Reaching One Thousand: 
A Story of Love, Motherhood and Autism
Rachel Robertson.
Collingwood, Victoria, Australia: Black, 2012.
reviewed by alison quaggin harkin
When one of my sons was diagnosed with autism and a cognitive disability, 
I became fascinated with memoirs by mothers whose children had autism or 
other disabilities. Many of these memoirs were moving, but, after I had read 
a few, I began to notice a certain sameness to the narrative arc. They tended 
to present a linear journey, during which the author overcomes multiple chal-
lenges to become a super mom who devotes her life to her child, no matter 
what the cost to herself. Both the linearity and the sense of “overcoming” did 
not feel like the truth—or at least not the only truth.
Rachel Robertson’s beautifully written Reaching One Thousand: A Story of 
Love, Motherhood and Autism offers a very different kind of narrative. In an 
introduction and twelve personal essays, she explores ways of understanding 
autism, her own life, and her autistic child, whom she calls Ben (not his real 
name). In addition, Robertson, who teaches professional writing and publish-
ing at Curtin University in Western Australia, reflects on the process of writ-
book reviews
 journal of the motherhood initiative             181 
ing a memoir, reminding her readers that all life stories are only fragments 
of a larger, messier experience. In “On Pomegranates and Life Stories: An 
Introduction,” she explains: “This narrative can’t be a simple chronological 
story … because my life is one of disruption and disjunction. The ‘soaring 
curve’ of an imagined life has been broken and re-made in a different shape. 
It is earth-bound, not soaring; sharp-edged, not curved. In this, I think, it is 
actually like most people’s stories” (6). 
The author demonstrates the creative power of such “disruption and dis-
junction” in the first essay, “Reaching One Thousand,” which was joint win-
ner of the 2008 Calibre Prize. It is a meditation on how Robertson—who 
struggled to learn mathematics as a child—seeks to understand Ben’s pas-
sionate love for numbers. At the same time, she reflects on her relationship 
with her own mother, her mother’s remarkable gift for mathematics, connec-
tions between the generations, and various ways of engaging with her son. 
Robertson reveals the similarities between her own and Ben’s lived stories 
more explicitly in the essays “Pumpkin Scones” and “Raw Experience.” In the 
former, she recounts her childhood feelings of sensory overload and isolation, 
a memory triggered after Ben—despite his sensitivity to sound—attends a 
school disco party and spends the evening dancing alone. “Raw Experience” 
includes descriptions of Ben’s intense awareness of smells, as well as a lovely 
dream-like sequence in which the author remembers a childhood home: “In 
the early morning when the magpies woke me, there was a smell of lemon, 
eucalyptus and hope” (39). Useful and relevant information from scholarly 
works on autism is included in this essay (as it is throughout the book) to 
elaborate upon Robertson’s observations.
In two essays, Robertson examines the experience of receiving an autism 
diagnosis and what happens afterward. “The Cage” describes testing and the 
official diagnosis of Ben’s autism, while “Bonus” details the manner in which 
government services are provided to carers of people with disabilities in Aus-
tralia. For me, “The Cage” is not quite as engaging as most of the other es-
says, perhaps because the health professionals depicted in it seem somewhat 
anonymous (which may have been the author’s intention). Similarly, because 
“Bonus” focuses—quite reasonably—on government policies in Australia, 
North American readers may find it less relevant to their own situation. Nev-
ertheless, both essays provide a thoughtful look at parents’ frustrations as they 
deal with complex rules and regulations. 
Perhaps most memorable for me is Robertson’s frequent examination of 
ways in which we might recognize and attempt to change neurotypical (i.e., 
non-autistic) views of people with autism. For instance, in “Frog in Girlland,” 
she states that while the “lack of pretend play is seen as evidence of limited 
imagination” (170) in children with autism, “[i]f you are an autistic person 
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182             volume 4,  number 2
in a neurotypical world, simply getting through each day can be an act of 
creativity” (170). 
I know I will reread Reaching One Thousand, and I recommend it for every 
mother’s bookshelf. I am grateful to Robertson for clarifying my own ongoing 
liminal experience with my son—the sense of being “separate from ordinary 
life; [of standing] on the sidelines watching other people live normally” (102). 
While this liminal space may feel isolated at times, it also offers unexpected 
possibilities for celebrating and interpreting the past, the present, and what-
ever the future holds—and isn’t that what all mothers hope for as they and 
their children grow and change, both together and separately? 
Mothering and Literacies
Amanda B. Richey and Linda Shuford Evans, eds.
Bradford, Ontario: Demeter Press, 2013.
reviewed by hallie palladino
The literate-illiterate binary has a stranglehold on the way we understand 
written communication. In Mothering and Literacies, editors Amanda B. 
Richey and Linda Shuford Evans shatter that binary, dispensing with literacy 
in the singular. Instead, their more inclusive notion of “literacies” sheds light 
on how mothers are impacted by social expectations surrounding literacy 
and demonstrates the ways mothers develop and wield their own literacies 
in response to specific mothering challenges. The unifying premise of this 
book is that public discourses about mothering powerfully influence literacy 
researchers, policy makers, and educators and we ignore them at our peril.
In her introduction, Linda Shuford Evans warns against “the malpractice 
of focusing on literacy as a subject or a skill rather than as part of a child and 
a way of life” (9). When Evans’s son was in second grade, a school initiative 
designed to encourage reading turned him from an enthusiastic reader into 
a reluctant one. Because he tested above his grade level, her son was obliged 
to read books written for much older children. This homework of tedious 
reading soon replaced their family’s treasured story time. Evans still regrets 
that she fell “into the complicity of allowing schools to define the value of our 
family literacy practices, even when I knew better” (9).
The drawbacks of institutionally imposed literacy curricula are enumerated 
throughout this book. One notable example is contributor Stacey Crooks’s 
critique of the strange paradox encapsulated by the motto “You Are Your 
Child’s First Teacher.” This not-so-gentle admonition demands that moth-


Reaching One Thousand: A Story of Love, Motherhood and Autism

Palko, Abigail L.

book reviews
 journal of the motherhood initiative             177 
Understanding Reproductive Loss: 
Perspectives on Life, Death and Fertility
Sarah Earle, Carol Komaromy, and Linda Layne, eds.
Surrey, England/Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2012.
reviewed by abigail l. palko
In Understanding Reproductive Loss: Perspectives on Life, Death and Fertility, 
editors Sarah Earle, Carol Komaromy, and Linda Layne offer an interdis-
ciplinary, transnational examination of different experiences of reproductive 
failures and loss, countering the near-exclusive focus of research on human 
reproduction on reproductive success. The chapters in Understanding Re-
productive Loss will prove useful to scholars and medical practitioners alike. 
The collection’s insights also contribute to the growing body of literature on 
nontraditional family formation at a moment of significant shifts in (West-
ern) understandings of normative kin and family formations. Collectively, the 
chapters imagine and situate new modes of kinship unique to the twenty-first 
century; as Linda Layne argues: “members of the pregnancy loss support 
movement are forging new forms of families and … their efforts to do so can 
best be understood in the context of other emerging family including single 
mothers by choice, two-mom and two-dad families, surrogate mothers, and 
new figurations of older forms of family formations such as adoption” (138).
Understanding Reproductive Loss engages with a wide range of topics and 
perspectives, utilizing multiple disciplinary approaches, including oral histo-
ries, cyberethnographies, and interviews. The editors’ aim is to highlight the 
diversity and fluidity of experience in the realm of reproductive failures with-
out hierarchicalizing the various losses as more or less traumatic, more or less 
serious. The first seven chapters accordingly analyze the loss of normative re-
productive expectations, like infertility, involuntary childlessness, involuntary 
sterilization, the impact of cancer treatments on fertility, and complications 
during pregnancy like preeclampsia and diabetes, as well as different experi-
ences of miscarriage, including those diagnosed during a sonogram and those 
sustained by surrogates.
The collection simultaneously focuses extensively (nine of the sixteen 
chapters) on the topic of stillbirth, making it particularly useful to scholars 
and practitioners interested in this form of reproductive loss. This approach 
provides a multi-faceted look at stillbirth that explores cultural reactions to 
it in Australia, Belgium, Cameroon, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the 
United States that enables the editors to present the perspectives of a number 
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178             volume 4,  number 2
of actors involved in the reproductive experience, including the parents, mid-
wives and nurses, and grandparents, thereby underscoring the social nature of 
reproductive loss. It also creates a nuanced concept of “babyhood,” blurring 
the lines between antenatal and post-partum existence. Further, the variety 
of perspectives helps to demonstrate that not all reproductive failures prompt 
unalloyed grief or feelings of loss; the multiple explorations of stillbirth cap-
ture the range of emotional responses to this common pregnancy outcome.
The choice to focus so deeply on stillbirth consequently leaves some signif-
icant lacunae in the forms of reproductive loss considered. Other topics that 
beg further study include maternal mortalities, including death in childbirth; 
prenatal diagnoses of fetal abnormalities; birth experiences that do not follow 
the mother’s plan; fathers’ experiences of reproductive loss, including loss of 
custody and their experience of abortion. One chapter even opens with an an-
ecdote about a young woman about to give birth to a baby she will reluctantly 
give up for adoption, but none of the chapters actually analyzes this form of 
reproductive loss. The introduction sketches out a preliminary understanding 
of reproductive loss, but, given the ground-breaking nature of this collection, 
deeper theorization of such loss ought to have been included. Additionally, as 
several contributors note, the prevailing academic discourse of reproductive 
loss is still highly hetero-normative in its assumptions; while some of the 
chapters in this collection break free of this shortcoming, a number do not, 
and further consideration of the impact of sexuality and sexual orientation on 
the experience of reproductive loss is needed. A minor weakness of the col-
lection is the number of distracting typos. Ultimately, though, these critiques 
do not diminish the significant contributions that this collection makes to our 
understanding of women’s experiences of reproductive failures.
Taken together, the essays tie attitude changes toward the treatment and 
management of grief stemming from unsuccessful reproductive efforts to 
larger social evolutions in acceptance of public expressions of grief, as con-
tributor Kate Woodthorpe suggests. Overall, Understanding Reproductive 
Loss: Perspectives on Life, Death, and Fertility begins to unpack some of the 
complexities that women experience when their reproductive efforts do not 
follow the hetero-normative normalized script that Western societies have 
come to privilege as the presumed outcome of all pregnancies. It gives voice 
to those previously silenced and offers insight into their experience for schol-
ars researching these aspects of reproduction and practitioners caring for the 
women who experience reproductive loss. 


Understanding Reproductive Loss: Perspectives on Life, Death and Fertility

Baumel, Judith

216       volume 4, number 1
Another Young Person’s Suicide
judith baumel
You changed my life.  You marked my life.
You retuned my life.  I want still a metaphor
For what you did. Made me dry soil so I absorb
Every drop thirstily.  Made me wet soil the rain
Spills over wastefully, past my roots. Dark soil.  
Top soil. Poor Soil.  Someone else changed
My daughter’s life today. The desperate trail
You blazed opened before her. Differently.
Of course.  Hers will be different.
I’m still measuring the grade on mine.  Where 
Have you been all these years, and how
How have you been?  There. Where. Gone.  
It’s a brutal business. Brutal and unrelenting.


Another Young Person’s Suicide

Lisella, Julia

BOOK REVIEWS
 JOURNAL OF THE MOTHERHOOD INITIATIVE             271 
emotional support, companionship, affection, and caregiving, with their in-
laws than do women.
Merrill found that “living at a distance is related to worse relationships with 
parents for daughters” and explains that, in some cases, geographical distance 
not only preserves the parent-child relationship, it influences how their indi-
vidual and respective roles are viewed. For example, women in Merrill’s study 
referred, and often deferred, to the “primary grandmother,” the mother of 
the daughter or son who lived closest, when they considered their own living 
arrangements.
This book will prove useful to marriage and family counselors, as well as 
undergraduate and graduate classes focusing on family relationships. 
Bite Your Tongue
Francesca Rendle-Short
North Melbourne, Victoria: Spinifex, 2011.
Reviewed by Julia Lisella
“Some stories are hard to tell, they bite back. To write this one, I’ve had to 
come at it obliquely, give myself over to the writing with my face half turned.” 
Despite her warning of an oblique narrative, Bite Your Tongue tells a difficult 
story with directness, honesty, and a great deal of love. The story captures the 
deep longing of an adolescent girl for the approval and love of a mother who 
was so focused on her moral crusade—to rid Queensland, Australia of “smut-
ty” literature during the 1970s—that she sacrificed her daughter’s well-being 
and safety throughout the years of middle school and high school. Though 
the narrative trajectory recalls many other daughter-mother memoirs, Fran-
cesca Rendle-Short circumvents the pitfalls of blame and revenge to tell an 
intricate tale of attachment, disappointment, and finally acceptance, even ad-
miration for her mother.
Rendle-Short interweaves public and private documents as much as she 
interweaves fiction and memoir. X-rays of her mother’s hands, family photo-
graphs from an old instamatic camera, and copies of documents from library 
archives reveal her mother’s vulnerability as well as her determination and 
drive. The blending of fiction and archival research also allows Rendle-Short 
to examine and eventually understand her own history. For example, Rend-
le-Short’s fictional character Glory discovers that MotherJoy (the fictional 
mother) read all of the books she recommended banning; Rendle-Short’s real 
BOOK REVIEWS
272             VOLUME 3,  NUMBER 2
mother, Angel, may not have done so: “As she read, MotherJoy mumbled to 
herself, incoherently. It must have been about what she was reading, the con-
tent of these pages, because there was an exultation of colour along the line of 
her jaw across her cheeks. Did she read these books because she wanted to?” 
(190). In the memoir section that follows, Rendle-Short writes, “I wondered 
whether my mother Angel read the books on her death list” (191). Yet Ren-
dle-Short discovers one document that reveals that Angel did read Lolita and 
found it both “beautifully written” and “a rotten book” (192).
The fictional side of the story frames reality in interesting ways. At one 
point the fictional narrator, Glory, notes that she and her older sisters all at-
tended different high schools, none of them in her neighbourhood. The story 
told in Francesca’s own voice reveals the possibility that each high school may 
have been a target of her mother’s long-term coordinated anti-smut cam-
paign. And while fictional Glory will go to great lengths to prove her loyalty 
to her mother when she participates in one book burning reported in the sto-
ry, the adult narrator, Francesca, visits bookstores hunting down the titles her 
mother had once tried to ban from schoolrooms and university reading lists. 
Rendle-Short points out the limitations of both fiction and memoir, however, 
in her juxtaposition of events. The fictional MotherJoy holds her daughter’s 
hand, accepts the ministrations of her six daughters the day before she dies; 
the actual Angel Rendle-Short drives her six girls away days before her death 
by causing “a scene.”
Despite the pain recalled, the story is also poignantly funny. Rendle-Short 
uses the hymn Onward Christian Soldier to name her characters, i.e. the fa-
ther’s name is Onward and his surname is Soldier. Determined to teach her 
youngest two daughters about sex before the educational system influences 
their impressionable minds, MotherJoy uses a pig’s head to teach her girls 
about the female anatomy—one of the few times she uses her previously 
earned medical degree! Through inventive storytelling and loving atten-
tion to language, Bite Your Tongue manages to transpose a shameful personal 
history into a celebration of language, text, and the intricate bond between 
mother and daughter. 


Bite Your Tongue

McKie, Jane

 JOURNAL OF THE MOTHERHOOD INITIATIVE       255 
The Monster of Ravenna’s Mother
JANE MCKIE
My monster rides my hip. I think him perfect. 
His one eye, a Caithness glass paperweight, 
coddles a tiny empire of misfits at its heart, 
clear euphony where only candles penetrate. 
As for my heart, that’s where a life of failure
curls, withered from scrutiny. But look at me
with my monster! The best thing I have made.
