Crib Notes: What to Read When You Crave Adult Conversation
Four irresistible books to read when you feel starved of grown-up company.
Some of the most important friendships I have made as an adult, have been made through motherhood.
Several years ago, I was walking home from my second child’s eight-week check up. A woman fell into step with me and gestured to my son, curled up in my baby-wearing coat. ‘It’s so great when you learn to breastfeed them in a sling, isn’t it?’ she said. We continued walking, talking about everything from fussy first-born children to Literary Speed Dating. After fifteen minutes, we both arrived at our destination – it turned out we lived opposite each other on the same street! This woman – my friend Mel – has become one of the people I text at 7.30 am when my children are threatening nuclear levels of unhappiness over pancakes and I only have one egg. And she is one of the friends I text on a grey Monday afternoon when I’m feeling low and in need of a ‘friendship top-up’. I know she will offer me coffee, energising conversation, and for my three-year-old there is the priceless allure of other people’s toys.
Most of my close friendships with other mothers are characterised by this kind of mutual emotional support. Still, there are weeks when we can’t fit each other into our busy schedules of pick-ups and drop-offs, drama clubs and swimming lessons, work and errand-running. For weeks during the summer holidays, we might be like ships in the night, finding that we are away with our families on alternate weeks. Frequently, I can feel isolated, lonely and starved of adult company. During these times, I’ll turn to a book with with a charming, witty, warm-hearted narrative voice – the kind of book I know will keep me in good company during lonely times.
In this issue of Crib Notes, I am recommending four fabulous books by women that will give you the grown-up, good company you need.
Enjoy x
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Breasts by Jean Hannah Edelstein
In this moving and funny memoir, Jean Hannah Edelstein writes with irresistible candour about her relationship with her body – specifically, her breasts. The book is split into three pleasingly concise chapters. The first of these, is ‘Sex’, in which Jean reflects on her early-teens years, as she and her friends started wearing bras and learned quickly that breasts were both a joke and a danger. If they weren’t kept under wraps you could be branded a slut, you might get unwanted – but unavoidable – attention from male teachers, and you might distract boys in class, as if ‘a glimpse of cleavage could lead a promising young man to ruin’. Jean describes moving to London after college in the sex-saturated, celebrity-magazine culture of the early noughties: she nails the double-edged experience of having ‘a great rack’. Sure, there is power in feeling attractive, but there is also the pervasive sense that simply owning breasts is an open invitation for them to be ogled, commented on and even grabbed. I found myself nodding along vigorously as I read, underlining almost every sentence. In the second chapter, Jean writes candidly about nursing her first child. This chapter vividly evokes the blood, sweat and tears of pregnancy, birth and the wild, hormonal early days of babyhood. It called me right back to nursing around the clock, and the liberation of finally getting one's own body back after breastfeeding. In the final chapter, Jean’s relationship with her breasts is suddenly, unexpectedly cut short when she learns she has breast cancer and immediately faces a double mastectomy. Here, in particular, her writing sparkles: it is painfully funny, poignant and moving. A woman’s relationship with her body can be fraught; subject to unwanted attention, often a source of frustration and guilt, and yet, Jean writes lovingly of her breasts.
When to Read It: One of the real joys of this book is its brevity. At only ninety-nine pages it can be read over one, two or three short sittings, taking around the same length of time as a coffee or two with a good friend and having much the same effect. As my friend Katie puts it, Jean Hannah Edelstein is ‘like a reasonable, normal adult person you would want to chat with’. It is a pleasure to spend time with her prose, which feels elegant but also delightfully sharp, wryly witty and true.
How to Read It: The ultra-lightweight hardback is one of the cutest, most stylish hardbacks I’ve seen in a while. I highly recommend treating yourself to it (buy it here).
What to Read Next: After reading this book, I’m looking forward to spending more time with Jean Hannah Edelstein’s previous memoir, This Really Isn’t About You. Breasts also put me in mind of Emilie Pine’s essay collection Notes to Self.
Sandwich by Catherine Newman
This boldly hilarious and generous novel is about fifty-four year old Rachel, who is spending a week at Cape Cod with her grown-up kids and her ageing parents. The family have been holidaying at this idyllic beach town for years, and in many ways, this is a more mellow season of life. Holidays are certainly more relaxed without little kids who violently oppose sunscreen application and are relentlessly committed to getting sand in the most uncomfortable places. Rachel chats contentedly to her daughter, Willa, about erotic Top Chef dreams (I know! The openness of Americans!), and the family visit their favourite haunts: the beach, the candy store, the clam shack. Rachel is as besotted as ever with her family – immoderately happy to spend the week with them. And yet, this is a time of change: Rachel is beholden to the tumult of perimenopause – often hot, furious and not entirely in control of everything that comes out of her mouth. And, it also becomes clear that for Rachel’s eldest son, life is on the move. Memories of previous trips wash up, some taffy-sweet and some sharp with grief. Rachel reflects on the glorious messy reality of motherhood, midlife and long, loving marriage. Sandwich might be considered a breezier, zestier companion piece to Miranda July’s All Fours or Clare Lombardo’s Same As It Ever Was: it gets right under the skin of motherhood as a physical experience (Rachel describes her body as ‘a satchel of scars’) and offers up big emotional truths with heart-on-sleeve frankness. It is full of overwhelmingly gorgeous, resonant lines like this one: ‘The children’s features shattered me a little bit—as if someone had siphoned love out of me and tattooed it onto someone else’s face.’
When to Read It: Firstly, this is the kind of low stakes, high pleasure read that is both a joy and a relief when the mental load is taking up most of your bandwidth. But also – Rachel is genuinely loveable: she is wonderfully flawed (I felt so much solidarity with her social faux pas and trouble with boundaries!) and simultaneously reassuring to be around. She is that mum-friend with slightly older children (in Rachel’s case, a lot older), whose words give you hope for how things might be one day. ‘I had no idea it would be this good,’ she says, ‘If you’d have shown Nick and me videos of this while we were still squatting on the beach to comfort a crying someone about the sand having a shrimp smell? We would not have believed you.’
How to Read It: I listened to the fabulous audiobook edition. If you can hold out for two weeks, the paperback edition publishes on April 17th (it’s currently out in hardback) at a delightfully manageable 240 pages.
Sensitive content: The book delves (sensitively but affectingly) into pregnancy loss and abortion.
What to Read Next: After reading Sandwich, I can’t wait to give Catherine Newman’s debut novel, We All Want Impossible Things, a whirl.
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
One evening in November I went to the Orion 2025 Showcase. Amongst many talented authors, I saw Dr Nussaibah Younis talk about her debut novel Fundamentally. I liked her immediately — she was charismatic, sexy, mischievously funny and a globally recognised expert on contemporary Iraq. I knew instantly I would want to include her book in an issue of Crib Notes — a novel which can be succinctly described as ‘ISIS brides, but it’s a comedy’. Nadia is a bisexual, ex-Muslim academic who has recently been dumped by her lover. When the UN offers her a job deradicalising ISIS women in Iraq, she accepts, hoping to get away from rejection, heartbreak and her dysfunctional relationship with her devout mother. Once there, she finds herself embroiled in the ludicrous machinations of bureaucracy and surrounded by ‘proper grown-ups with big UN jobs’, whilst she feels like an imposter. Visiting the women’s camp, Nadia meets Sara, a sweary East Londoner, who joined ISIS at the soberingly young age of fifteen, showing up to a war-zone with a suitcase full of Dairy Milk chocolate. In Sara, Nadia recognises elements of herself and decides that she will try to get Sara back to her family in the UK at any cost. What happens next is impossible for the reader to predict, but includes the following: a gym-obsessed Geordie with a worrying affection for Lawrence of Arabia; a night of debauched UN hard-partying which made me snort with laughter as I waited at the school gates; the farcical employment of ‘Sheikh Jason’, a Californian Muslim-convert whose religious practice includes the use of crystals, and a confession which jeopardises everything. Provocative and bitingly funny, Fundamentally punctures every imaginable taboo, whilst handling its complex subject matter with sensitivity, compassion and nuance.
When to Read It: Back in January, I wrote that I would be reaching for this book ‘when in the mood for a Grown-Up Good Time after a day spent at soft play and M&S Cafe.’ It absolutely ticked that box: full of proper adult humour; sex, and big, juicy, important themes to make you feel like you’ve used your brain, along with having a laugh. And although Nadia begins the book self-absorbed, trying a little too hard to be funny, and always looking for the next shag or tequila shot to deflect from her demons, she turns out to be excellent company. Her relationship with Sara forces her to confront her own hurt: the ten year, booze-soaked situationship which forced her to contort herself; and her disownment by her mother when she confessed that she no longer wanted to be a Muslim. What she learns, amongst other things (how to illegally cross borders via people smuggler, for example) is self-compassion.
Sensitive Content: The experiences of the ISIS women are harrowing and desperate; the book mentions rape, coercion, extreme violence and the separation of mothers from their children.
How to Read It: If audiobooks are your jam, I cannot recommend this one enough. Sarah Slimani brings Fundamentally to life, complete pitch-perfect accents and unparalleled comic timing. Meanwhile, the hardback is a relatively standard 315 pages – worth taking into consideration if you’re reading with a baby in one hand and a book in the other (buy it here).
What to Read Next: I recommend Nicolas Padamsee’s England is Mine, a wickedly satirical coming-of-age novel about marginalisation, radicalisation and belonging in contemporary Britain.
Chopping Onions on my Heart by Samantha Ellis
I met Samantha Ellis over ten years ago in the cosy authors’ yurt at Edinburgh Book Festival. We immediately clicked, chatting about her gorgeous bibliomemoir, How to Be a Heroine. And so began not only our friendship, but my affection for Sam’s warmly conversational writing. Her latest book, Chopping Onions on My Heart, is just as personal and illuminating as her previous two. It opens in a North London playground, where Sam finds herself unexpectedly in tears as she talks to another parent about the benefits of bilingual nurseries. Samantha’s mother tongue, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic – the language she grew up with – is vanishing; and, for the first time, she fears there may be nothing left of her parents’ culture to pass on to her son. Caught off guard by grief, Samantha reaches back into her Iraqi-Jewish family’s history to understand how their language was lost. The circumstances in which her parents left their homeland – after successive, ever-increasing decades of discrimination and violence towards Jews – are distressing. She reflects on the fragments of culture that – miraculously – have been held onto, some packed in suitcases and some only in ‘memories and words’, carried from place to place and safekept. How might rituals, heirlooms and traditions be given a joyous new life – one that gently remembers their origins, but is not shaded only by sorrow? In search of answers, Samantha joins the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages via Zoom. She contemplates the use of kohl (for perfect Scheherazade-esque winged-eyeliner, and for smearing on newborns’ eyelids to protect them from the evil eye). She encounters magic bowls at the British Museum, and delves into the lore of the raging, seducing demon Lilith. She tries to interest her picky son in Iraqi Jewish flavours – mango pickle, date syrup, and turmeric-spiced lentil soup – and plants a garden to ‘cure homesickness’ with the stones from Iraqi nabug fruit. The result is a vivid, urgent and heartfelt book about loss, belonging, and beginning anew.
When to Read It: The book is a life-affirming remedy for despair. Sometimes (especially when doomscrolling, late at night) it is so terribly easy to feel depressed about what we might (or might not) pass on to our children. Chopping Onions on my Heart is a radiant and moving meditation on how we might find renewal even in the shadow of devastating events—something that feels vibrantly, even radically, hopeful in uncertain times. It is, I think, worth saying that Chopping Onions on My Heart is richly detailed – you will want to read it closely, at a time when you can give it the attention it deserves. I savoured it slowly over three weeks, reading mainly in the evenings after my children were asleep.
How to Read It: Chopping Onions on my Heart is newly out in hardback from Chatto & Windus (buy it here). It is a relatively manageable 288 pages, but if that feels like too much to juggle, you could opt for the ebook.
What to Read Next: I adore Samantha’s previous books How to Be a Heroine: Or what I’ve learned from reading too much and Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life (you can read my review of the latter here).
From the archive…
For more fabulous books to keep you company during lonely parenting weeks, why not dip into this archive issues of Crib Notes:
I hope you enjoy your well-deserved reading time x
I just finished Breasts by Jean Hannah Edelstein and completely agree with you - perfect length, so much wit and so many wry observations. I'm going to pick up her other memoirs!
Feeding in a sling was a skill I was so proud of, I miss doing it now my babies have all grown out of theirs. I have a copy of Breasts and am excited to read, though I've not been in the right mood for it quite yet!