“It shook me, the idea of having a pre-mother self and post-mother self and thinking that you kind of have to rip the old one out of the book, that they’re entirely different beings, but I suppose you’re just getting more finely tuned as you go along.”
“I see having kids for me as just being this identity boot-camp and it became essential for everyone – myself, my kids, my partner – that I deal with a lot of the stuff that I’d never dealt with before, otherwise I just wasn’t going to survive it.”
“I had ginormous maternalcravings, to the point where I look back now & think‘what was that’? I had that feeling for a long time.”
“As newborns, we had ways of communicating that we were stressed without actually using words. Arching our backs, scrunching our faces, reaching our arms open, kicking and so on. Our body is our first language. As adults, I think we should listen to it. If something is not quite right and we don’t listen, our body will find another way of telling us. Whether through stress, injury or sickness, it will let us know.”
“As a parent to a child with a disability you really have to become an advocate and I didn’t really know what that meant, but it just means putting your foot down. I’m ruthless when it comes to Arlo.”
Written in an approachable and engaging tone, Hamnet is the story of the death of Shakespeare’s son, it is a work of speculative fiction. O’Farrell breathes exquisite life into this
