Becky and Elena

I’m not going to compare Becky Barnicoat’s book to Elena Ferrante. That’s ridiculous. You can’t do a one-on-one. Becky is writing a long-form graphic novel, incorporating comics, while Ferrante operates in the heady realm of fiction, and plenty of fiction, books upon books, spread across the four Neapolitan novels. Still, after finishing Barnicoat’s book. I kept thinking, ‘What is this feeling?’ What is happening here? The link formed in my mind. Something powerful arises when I give myself over to the portrayals of experience by both authors. The more I read, the more I’m attuned to what I can only describe as the loosening of consciousness, the ability in some works to begin to inhabit another experience. Both authors refuse the sanitized narratives that dominate popular culture around motherhood. Instead of idealized, I felt – I hope – an expansion of empathy through both their documentations of what it means to become a mother. How do I feel? I will never ever know what it’s like, obviously, not even close, not a scintilla of a scintilla. But still, Becky’s got this way of conveying experience. Her drawing is that effective.

While reading Barnicoat’s book, I noted the repetition; the challenges kept coming, through the black and white panels, through the mordant sense of humour. The result was that I drew closer each time, a little bit closer to understanding what she went through in those initial months of being a mother. Her graphic memoir accomplishes this consciousness expansion through an elastic style that permits the maternal figure to morph, generate, and become monstrous—to transform into different living forms simultaneously. Because of her approach, which allows for multiplicity, Barnicoat sustains the experience, presents contradictory variety, and validates the idea that becoming a mother involves inhabiting multiple identities simultaneously. Some are monstrous. The face of the maternal figure grows contorted, inhuman, and then we’re back to the placid, the baffled, the asleep.

Spoiler alert: I was Becky’s roommate back in the heady days of ’06 and ’07, when she was drawing comics in the bedroom down the hall of our creaky newbuild in Dalston. I saw different sides of her. I didn’t see her transform into a demonic figure. I didn’t see her face take on outrageous, elongated dimensions. She was drawing excellent comics, even back then.

When I reflect on the Ferrante experience, which occurred a few years later, it again was profound. It too hinged on variety, encompassing all these different angles of what it is like to be a particular human. Ferrante achieves a similar expansion of consciousness through her exploration of motherhood as a land of frustration, where identity is at best fragmented and at worst just…lost? Her protagonists are often intellectual women—writers, professors, cartoonists—and they usually become frayed by life and its morphing array of responsibilities. Unlike most writers who take on the subject, Ferrante doesn’t couch her characters’ pain and confusion in self-deprecating humour. Instead, she presents motherhood as genuinely dangerous territory, which is what I took from it.

There are ways to invalidate this kind of consciousness expansion immediately—how would you know, dude, you’re never going to know what it’s like to be someone else. Yes, yes, ok, of course, OF COURSE. But in instances like this, it feels good to try, maybe keep quiet, maybe mention it years later, in a piece buried on your own personal website, knowing it’s never a complete process. Perhaps if you do it enough through art, and if you read these books with the intention of repeating this action of trying to become someone else, you will become better at it.

Both Barnicoat and Ferrante understand that authentic representation of motherhood requires contradictions and no easy resolutions. Where they converge is in the variety—I haven’t seen Becky since her kids arrived. Her version is never portrayed as monolithic, but as a constantly shifting landscape of emotions, identities, and possibilities. I know she’s changed. I’ve got the book in my hands.

Barnicoat’s work is obviously much funnier and more terrifying than Ferrante’s, yet both achieve an expansion of empathy through sustained immersion in human experience. With all its humour, I was pleased to see the astringent note that Becky ended on, in which this journey isn’t romanticized. After a long process, spanning many months and years, Barnicoat’s narrator, who has taken on many different forms, finds a quiet moment in the kitchen where she can fully express her satisfaction with motherhood. This satisfaction feels earned – paid in full — precisely because it comes after, not instead of, the chaos and transformation that preceded it. I’m sure Becky would be laughing at this comparison right now and would be kind of embarrassed by it, but both works achieve something profound in their refusal to romanticize while still allowing for moments of genuine fulfillment to emerge organically from dirty plates, dirty nappies, an explosion of shit, an explosion of joy.