Maternity & Other Corsets

by Siobhan Jamison

Maternity and Other Corsets is the story of Maebh Murray as she chases the bohemian life through Europe with a French alcoholic painter she meets in Prague the summer after the Velvet Revolution. They move to Paris and have a child, and Maebh becomes breadwinner by day and breast feeder by night. They try life in Greece, Ireland, and Spain, where she ponders her artistic pretensions, bad marriage, and parenting and how difficult it is, in an atmosphere of western arrogance that is blind to its own contradictions, to make it all work.

198 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2019

Reviews

[Paul Dore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Siobhan Jamison in Maternity and Other Corsets has written a beautiful and challenging account about relationships, marriage, and becoming a mother. With the author as a guide, many parts of her story resonate in profound ways - both in the quality of writing and confidence of her voice. There’s a power in sharing these stories, and when done well, a transference between writer and reader happens where we can all grow and understand we are not alone. Bravo!

[Michelle Boone · Rating 5 out of 5]

We meet twenty-three year old Maebh, the protagonist of Maternity and Other Corsets, in the early nineties in Prague. She has come from Toronto to teach English to Czechoslovakians who have only recently been liberated from Communist rule. Although it seems as though Maebh spends the next ten years drifting in the wind from Prague to Paris to Greece to Dublin to Spain and then back again to some of these same places, we quickly learn how hard she’s had to work to achieve this free-spirited lifestyle. Wanting nothing more than to live the life of an artist, the irony is she never has time or energy for art because she is the sole breadwinner in her marriage for the better part of a decade. To further frustrate things, we are left to watch furiously as Maebh’s husband, Jean-Christopher, known as JC throughout the novel, squanders her meager earnings on drink or to occasionally paint canvases he never earns a penny for.

Still, it isn’t all a horrible struggle for Maebh and Ailis, the young daughter she gives birth to even before her twenty-fifth birthday. From the novel’s first pages, Maebh never comes across as victim but as someone who is “more determined than she realized to step forth in the experiment of life to feel something more than nothing at all — to feel it all.” And through Maebh’s delightful observations, readers get a glimpse of what it was like to live in Europe during the nineties. Driven home from a soirée with friends, she notes: “as they make the turn round Arc de Triomph — Frenchy little cars jagging deftly in and out of nonexistant lanes — Maebh feels fairly satisfied with life.” Or what it means to an Irish-Canadian to fully immerse herself in the landscape of her ancestors: “The sheep fields behind the house go on and on and on and she stares longingly out over them, admiring the way the grass puffs up irregular clumps on the loamy fertile dark earth. Nothing is flat here and even the golf course looks more natural — less garish— than anything you might see in North America. Walking on that bouncy grass is such joy. You feel distanced, uplifted even, by the soil itself and the realities deep within the earth’s core crust, and the air is gentle away from the sea. It nourishes in its way while the rough coast pulls the life out of you and strips the skin of nutrients.”

One of the things I enjoyed most about Jamison’s novel was the way she weaved her poetic insights about topics such as woman’s sexuality, father-daughter relationships, the fatigue of motherhood, and how maternity can be suffocating, throughout its pages. I highly recommend this book and can’t wait to read the sequel, Frozen Meat with Hooks, which I believe takes up where this one ends.

[Slow Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stayed up until 1am reading this the first day I opened it. Siobhan Jamison's prose announces her as the heir apparent of Toni Morrison and Milan Kundera. What a refreshing fact, to hold in one's hand irrefutable proof that great Canadian writers do exist outside the shadows of Munro and Atwood--and how long have we waited for a third woman capable of consummating that duo's triumvirate potential.

There is a likeness here to Munro's "Who Do You Think You Are?" in the semi-autobiographical *mode* of her novel, but its vividness and activity and panoply subject matters--a galaxy of Joyce scholarship, Jeff Koons art, Glenn Gould apologetics, ruminations on Prague's communism and the constraints of its avowed want-for-nothingness, all in just the first 30 pages--far surpass the considerations of the Ontario Gothic, etc.

Jamison's novel does not sag under the weight of these interests either: poetical micro-chapters serve as bright interstices to the grand arc of Maebh's story and lend a galloping pace to her peripatetic voyage that feels fittingly European.

This is literature about literature, in the most pleasant sense, but also an engaging compendium of diverse misogynies confronting diverse feminisms--and finally, it is the account of what is at times the rather bohemian life of a woman who feels utterly universal.

Highly recommended to readers of Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Chronicles, Kundera's "Ignorance", and to anyone who's ever spent time living in Paris, Prague, or Toronto

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many women will relate to Maebh, both in her struggles as well as her acts of heroism in the face of misogyny. Siobhan Jamison writes beautifully: unflinching, with clarity and great insight.