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4 hours ago
1
It’s a mark of the brilliance of Becky Barnicoat’s Cry When the Baby Cries that it worked for me, testing my patience only occasionally: as I’ve been known to tell people, while I like children a lot, I could never eat a whole one. I have a hunch that her book’s bracingly truthful tone will indeed make new (and new-ish) mothers feel very seen, just as some of the quotes on its jacket promise: no subject is for her off limits, from leaking breasts to dubious stains. But the more important thing by far is that it’s very funny and even sardonic. At her best, Barnicoat reminds me of Claire Bretécher (1940-2020), the great French cartoonist and one of the geniuses of the form.
When I was growing up, my mother hung one of Brétécher’s strips on the kitchen wall. In it, a woman with a baby is visited by a friend who drones on obliviously about her marvellous life. In the last frame, the friend has gone, and the woman, who now looks vaguely despairing, is holding her baby over the bin. (Honestly, I’m not very traumatised.) In Cry When the Baby Cries, Barnicoat is often on similar territory, her attention as much on the isolation that comes with having a baby as on the practicalities (though she’s good on the buggies and bottles, too). She’s lucky: she’s in love with her tiny son, who arrives thanks to IVF. But she’s lonely as well, and scratchy with exhaustion. My favourite page in the book is the one in which she turns the newborn days into modern art. It’s perfect! Why is he crying? is after Edvard Munch. Why am I crying? is after Picasso. Night Feeds is after Francis Bacon. Need … to … Sleep … is after Bridget Riley.
Barnicoat mixes it up, avoiding relentlessness (a constant danger, I fear, with baby books) by varying the pace with all kinds of pastiches and games, checklists and charts. She sends herself up wildly, and without vanity, her hairy legs and newfound animal instincts bringing to mind Quentin Blake’s illustrations for one of Roald Dahl’s darker books. However, if you’re older than her, as I am, the most interesting – and worrying – things she has to say all connect to social media. If WhatsApps groups can be a blessing for new mothers, they’re also a curse; motherhood as it’s depicted on Instagram is just another standard of female perfection that can never be achieved by any regular mortal.
When she draws herself staggering from the house with her baby kit like a dromedary about to cross the Sahara, I thought back to the birth of one of my younger sisters: however fed up or tired my mother was, at least she wasn’t under constant pressure to compare herself to beautiful strangers; to buy endless stuff that she couldn’t really afford, and didn’t really need. All of which makes Barnicoat’s decision to draw in black and white beautifully apposite for me. This is a very analogue book, somehow, and all the better and more uplifting for it. Mothers, log off! Here’s the antidote to all that striving; here is the muddle that will set your minds at rest, even if it won’t actually rock your baby to sleep.
