‘Love, fear, and a pursuit of fun’: What made Diksha Basu write a motherhood memoir
· Scroll
Visit extonnews.click for more information.
I am a fiction writer. I find fiction safe, escapist, protective – a barrier against the world. It’s true, of course, that all fiction comes from reality and mine is no exception but I can always use an excuse with fiction when needed. When The Windfall was published, my mother insisted she saw my father on the pages and my father insisted he saw my mother on the pages. I quickly insisted neither of them was on the pages.
And now I sit on the eve of publishing my first longform nonfiction on one of the most vulnerable topics in the world – motherhood. And I have nowhere to hide. I find myself wondering why I wrote this book.
The now
Perhaps I wrote it out of self-defence. My daughters (currently eight and nine) and I do not yet have an emotionally complex relationship. There are emotions, there are fights, and there is growth and mirroring and a foreshadowing of the complications to come, but adolescence, while lurking, has not quite arrived yet. We love each other, we tell each other that, they still climb into our bed in the morning and their arms reach for me and they press their faces against mine and let me shower...