Black Milk

Elif Shafak’s memoir examines the conflict she experienced between literary ambition and the expectation that motherhood should produce uncomplicated fulfilment. After the birth of her first child, postpartum depression and writer’s block forced her to confront fears that creative work, domestic responsibility and an independent identity could not coexist.

Shafak represents the competing parts of her personality as a private harem of argumentative inner women: the intellectual, the practical wife, the ambitious writer, the mystic and the maternal self. Personal narrative is combined with reflections on women writers including Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir. The result is a memoir about mental health, artistic identity and the cultural stories imposed on mothers.