Catherine Cho’s Inferno is the first ‘motherhood memoir’ I have read since reading Maria Tumarkin’s essay ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ in Dangerous Ideas About Mothers (2018). The topic of motherhood has been ‘overly melded’ to memoiristic writing, Tumarkin argues; it feels ‘too much like a foregone conclusion’.

This tendency to squeeze stories about motherhood into a pre-existing narrative form is driven partly by marketplace – by assumptions about what kind of books people want to read about and by mothers – and both derives from and perpetuates deeply held ideas about what mothers have to say, and what kinds of stories and ideas we want to hear from them.