Review: It Nearly Killed Me But I Love You

To call this book ‘brave’ is the kind of understatement that will be familiar to mothers told at antenatal classes that they could expect to feel ‘some discomfort in the birthing area’ after birth – a phrase which even now, some two decades after our eldest son was born, elicits snorts of derisive laughter from my husband.

In this memoir of new motherhood, Sinead Corcoran Dye, a journalist, writer and social media content creator, shares her journey through IVF, a traumatic pregnancy and birth, and severe postnatal depression that saw her hospitalised in Starship Hospital’s Mother and Baby Unit. Unflinching, yes. Yet this book is anything but grim. Even in the darkest, unlikeliest of places, Corcoran Dye finds the comically absurd – she is the friend you can always count on to make you laugh, but who isn’t afraid to be vulnerable.

Written as a collection of essays, the book is leavened with lists like ‘3 a.m. maternity leave Google searches,’ with text exchanges, Instagram posts or letters, and even an imaginary last will and testament. Corcoran Dye explores the impact of pregnancy and motherhood on friendships and relationships, the financial and personal imperatives to work outside the home and the guilt that this entails, mum-shaming, and the implications of posting children’s images on social media. She also discusses mental illness in depth, asking why it is not afforded the same consideration as any physical health issue. As she reminds us, the brain is an organ, too.

She draws primarily on her own experiences, but also provides other examples and cites relevant research to show how widespread these experiences are. We get her husband’s perspective, too. He pens a chapter reflecting on the events that she has related, including insights and suggestions into both how to support a partner with mental illness and how to cope while doing so.

You need not have walked as dark a path as Corcoran Dye’s to recognise the way one’s mind can play tricks – casting shadows and forming monsters, even making you feel like one yourself – when in the grips of postnatal sleep deprivation and anxiety. Nor do you have had to experience this to understand the ways the health system can and does fail women, or to understand the impact of a kind word from a health professional – and the devastation that can be wrought from an unthinkingly cruel or careless one.

I laughed. I nodded. I wanted to hurl the book across the room and howl in rage when reading a doctor’s response to Corcoran Dye’s anxiety around having ‘failed’ at giving birth to her daughter. And I cried – yes, actual tears – in one particular part where she recalls the paralysing grip of feeling like a failure as a mother while also realising a deep solidarity with other mums.

Corcoran Dye is deeply self-aware and offers what feels like an unvarnished and honest account, including addressing her boundaries around what she is and isn’t prepared to share with her readers. She captures well the contradictions of parenting – how you can both adore a baby and long for escape, how you can be eternally grateful to a spouse for their support and also want to stab them with a fork.

This book is for mums – ‘mums and stepmums and mums with mental illnesses and mums without mums.’ However, given the insight into experiences like IVF, hyperemesis gravidarum, and postnatal depression, I would think it is equally for their partners, family and friends – and those in the medical profession responsible for the care of new mothers. Corcoran Dye describes her motivation as:

‘writing for mothers: the ones too tired to be mothers today, so they hide in their rooms pretending not to notice that it’s gone dark outside; the ones knowing that someone else put their kids to bed so it’s too late to go be a decent mum now anyway; the mums who lie there in shame […] so that, maybe, if they could bring themselves to look out the window, they’d see it’s dark – but there’s a little candle out there, too.’

This book is that beacon. It is a light illuminating a path, but also shining on the lost and saying, ‘I see you. You are not alone.’

Reviewed by Philippa Tucker