Motherhood Under Capitalism on Édouard Louis’s A Woman’s Battles and Transformations and Lynne Tillman’s Mothercare for Frieze

Two brave, bold lyric books explore motherhood and caregiving, class and capitalism. Lynne Tillman writes unflinchingly and beautifully about her mother’s process of ageing. The novelist who is one of contemporary writing’s best essayists looks at the last decade of her mother’s life, the one where the medical establishment and money are in play. Louis writes of his mother from 25-45, the years a woman’s exchange value is in her looks: her sexuality and parenting. In Tillman’s book, her mother becomes an object. She describes her mother’s body being taken away after dying: ‘We saw it, that black rubber bag, for a few moments. Mother was just a thing now, anomalous, an object, nothing anymore. The men’s expertise added to her nonexistence. This was done to everybody, anybody, the impersonalness augmenting her new nothingness.’ The ‘everybody, anybody’ is key to Mothercare. Part memoir, part manual, the personal account opens up to warn us all of the hardships of caring for a sick parent. Read more at Frieze.