Don't Forget to Scream: Unspoken Truths About Motherhood

(Hardback)

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Description

Until I had my first child, and this is to my shame, I had little understanding of just how much mothers are hidden, their stories unspoken, even as they cross the street in plain sight.

Like grief or falling in love, becoming a mother is an experience both ordinary and transformative. You are prepared for the sleeplessness and wonder, the noise and the chaos, the pram in the hall. But the extent to which this new life can turn your inner world upside-down - nothing prepares you for that.

In this frank, funny and fearless memoir, Marianne Levy writes with heart-wrenching honesty about love and loss, rage and pain, fear and joy. She breaks the silence around the emotional turmoil that having a child can unleash and asks why motherhood is at once so venerated and so undervalued.

This is the real story of being a parent in the modern world. It is a book that mothers will be glad to have read - and that everyone else should read, too.

Reviews

I loved these sharp, unusual essays about motherhood and cried my way through much of the book. Childbirth, desire, consumerism and marketing of baby stuff, deciding to have a second child, goldfish. Recommended * Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun *
Don't Forget To Scream is funny and heartbreaking - a powerful portrayal of all that makes up motherhood. It feels both intimate and profoundly universal * Catherine Cho, author of Inferno *
Marianne Levy's Don't Forget to Scream tells the truth of modern motherhood like nothing else I've read. Bold, brave and brilliant, it is also full of humour, joy and warmth. I loved it * Cathy Rentzenbrink *
How I wish this book existed when I was a mother of young children. Each essay executes a brilliant swallow-dive from the enervating everyday of parenting into deep waters of profound and unorthodox thought. This is exciting, emboldening writing * Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep *
I read Marianne's book with a constricted throat and welling eyes. Her writing cuts to the quick - so deep, direct, and moving but also wry and funny, often provoking a choked laugh. These essays tug and prod at what it means to be a mother - the 'messy cat's cradle of womanhood' - in the most intimate, powerful and painfully honest way, leaving me ravaged, occasionally enraged, but also feeling profoundly seen * Beth Morrey, author of Saving Missy *
Phenomenal. Words like 'searing' and 'extraordinary' and 'blistering' will be used about this book, and they will not convey one tenth of the strength of it, nor the honesty nor the bravery in writing it * Emma Flint, author of Little Deaths *
Honest, witty, powerful and moving . . . an important book brimming with hard-won wisdom * Robert Webb, author of How Not To Be a Boy *
A brave, unflinching, utterly necessary book. I'm in awe of what it must have taken to write these searing and all too recognisable essays * Tammy Cohen, author of The Wedding Party *
I laughed, I cried and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. A brave, moving, brilliantly-written and often funny exploration of what it means to be a mother. I want everyone to read it * Anna Mazzola, author of The Clockwork Girl *
A remarkable book, cutting to the quick of what motherhood really feels like - the terror and the rage and the joy of it. The mundane rubs shoulders with the life-changing, the damply humdrum is shot through with calamitous love. I've read so much about motherhood, but I've never read anything as sharply honest as this; mothers will find themselves here * Shelley Harris, author of Jubilee *
Brilliant, funny, heartbreaking, and true, Marianne Levy's Don't Forget to Scream had me exploring my own experience of motherhood in an entirely new way. I simply can't stop thinking about it. * Deidre Mask, author of The Address Book *
An excellent book . . . elegant, funny, raw and beautiful. It made me angry with myself and the world but it also made laugh. Compulsive reading * Emma Beddington, author of Well Always Have Paris *
A gut-punch of recollections about early motherhood . . . Incredible, honest writing that gets to the heart of the experience. It's wonderful * Julia Raeside *
A remarkable memoir, threaded with humour and tenderness, and yet exposing the often crushing loneliness and unfairness of motherhood. A must-read for fathers and prospective fathers, this book made me wish I could go back in time and do parenting differently * Alex Reeve, author of The House on Half Moon Street *
Don't Forget to Scream is a work of painful genius. Exquisitely written, totally honest, insightful and alternately hilarious and moving. I don't have or want children and might not have picked the book up, thinking it's not "for" me. Which would have been a big mistake. Huge. The beauty of reading is in allowing a skilful writer to not only lead you into their world but picture yourself there. This is what Don't Forget To Scream achieves, and it's utterly compelling * Jo Harkin, author of Tell Me An Ending *
A beautifully, and at times agonisingly, honest confessional. Moving, funny, poignant and inciteful: Marianne's reflections shine a light on both the joys and lies about parenthood with which we're all complicit. This is This is Going To Hurt from the other side of the bed * Dr Keir Shiels, Consultant Paediatrician, Great Ormond Street Hospital *
Brilliant, brave, honest (and sometimes very funny) . . . Don't Forget To Scream should be read by anyone who has a mother * Lev Parikian *
A staggeringly, ferociously good book - unflinching but humane, real and funny and courageous, and vitally questioning. I wish we lived in a world where it didn't need to be written * Piers Torday *
The contradictions and complexities of motherhood dissected in a painfully accurate and extraordinarily funny way. Don't Forget to Scream is a must-read for anyone, not just mothers * Ania Bas, author of Odd Hours *
Don't Forget To Scream is a stunning, urgent, feminist masterpiece. Many of the essays brought me to tears, and I had to give myself breaks between them to digest their beauty and wisdom and insight before moving onto the next. In a world where motherhood is simultaneously deified and scorned, Levy expertly stitches together what this jarring juxtaposition means for the internal lives of women navigating this. She's brave enough to tell the truth about the daily conflicts between overwhelming love and overwhelming grief at the loss of self - conflicts that are rarely allowed to sit alongside each other, let alone felt within a five minute period. She's angry enough to speak out about the depraved normalisation of gynaecological violence, and the endless other ways mothers are failed by the government and societal expectations. And yet she also writes so beautifully about the overwhelming wonder of having children - the joys, the love, the laughter, and the true magic. So many mothers will see themselves in this book. And anyone who has ever rolled their eyes while a mother struggles to get a buggy onto the bus needs to read it too. A masterclass in empathy. I'm buying copies for everyone I know * Holly Bourne *
Funny, honest, courageous and brilliant . . . I really recommend it * Brian Bilston *
A terrific collection of bracing and often darkly funny personal pieces about the transformative experience of becoming a mother and the extent to which it derails your sense of self. I know I would have fallen upon it with immense gratitude and relief when I had my first child * The Bookseller *
Extraordinary. Levy brings to life so many feelings and thoughts that have lurked around my subconscious but are hard to look at clearly, let alone articulate. I wanted to read it slowly because it made me feel so many things, but ended up devouring it because it's so damn good * Emily Itami *
I finished this book in tears. It perfectly articulates the contradictions of motherhood, the breath-stealing, heart-aching, painful intensity - and, above all, the love. What a book * Emylia Hall *
Fierce, funny, frightening . . . Marianne Levy offers the unvarnished truth about motherhood, charting both its blisses and its many challenges. Rarely is writing this raw yet also this readable: Don't Forget to Scream digs deep, and the results are can't-look-away compelling. Essential reading for anyone who has kids, is thinking about having kids, knows someone who has kids, was once a kid - basically, for everyone * Holly Williams *
A paean to the messy, confounding, chaotic, beautiful, heartbreaking soup that is motherhood - I loved it * Kate Maxwell, author of Hush *
These brilliant essays are filled with the visceral, contradictory emotions of early motherhood. Filled with righteous anger at a society which still hasn't addressed how we mother in the modern world, they'll make you both cry and laugh. Everyone should read these words * Araminta Hall *
Fascinating . . . Although full of love and written in glittering prose, the domestic world the essays present is chaotic and at times full of rage * Irish Independent *
It's fabulous -- Eva Wiseman
I devoured this book about motherhood in all its complex, beautiful, ugly reality. It felt like seeing myself reflected on the page for the first time in the better part of a year. Like shouting out and finally hearing an echo in the darkness . . . I gobbled it up like something delicious and forbidden, something selfishly and exclusively mine . . . When I picked up this book it felt like being seen and heard . . . Reading and writing about mothering in such raw, searing, beautiful honesty is a radical act . . . hearing that my feelings are shared by even one other person - that the bittersweet, aching, love-pain of it all, the good tears and the bad tears, the inertia and the wonder, were not mine alone after all - felt like a revolutionary act of self-care * Metro *
Courageous . . . bursting with urgency, both pocket therapy for parents and a keen appraisal of the desperate bind of contemporary motherhood. Levy tells her story with a light touch, an exhausted heart and bright rage. She notes the pleasure, humour and sackfuls of love that exist alongside the sleep deprivation and fury, but more weight is given to the gruelling aspects of motherhood, the hidden spaces . . . If you are a mother, read this book to know you are not alone, to find vindication in your fury. If you are not a mother, read it to empathise with the mothers in your life * i newspaper *
Marianne's memoir, sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, unflinchingly frank, gives voice to the maelstrom of fear, rage, love and joy, the loss of identity and independence, and the pain that motherhood entails . . . will strike a chord with all parents * Camden New Journal *
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Author Bio

Marianne Levy is the author of several children's books and her journalism has appeared in the Independent, the Guardian and the Financial Times. She writes features and book reviews for the i newspaper. She lives in London.