These jottings provided a skeleton for her memoir, A Better Woman. When the acclaimed Australian novelist Susan Johnson was pregnant, and then after she had a baby, she scribbled notes about her experience. There wasn’t much time or energy for this, especially after her son was born, but she wrote things down because she is a compulsive writer who makes sense of her life by writing about it. She went on to have a second child, and continued to make notes.

These jottings provided a skeleton for her memoir, A Better Woman.
It turned out that there were complications from her births – a bad tear that led to the need for a temporary colostomy. She found this too distressing to tell her friends about but, for reasons to do with her own relationship to writing, she has told the whole story on the page. She published it, she says, partly out of a desire to “bring light to the experience of one woman and mother because our stories have long been dismissed as trivial and ‘only’ domestic”. Amazingly, this very personal account has amounted to something much more illuminating than you might expect.One of the issues of the current generation of women is how they reconcile motherhood and work, and what effect this has practically and psychologically, especially when women tend to have their first child late. And one of the issues of the history of literature is the place women have had in it, and how motherhood steals the opportunity – perhaps even the will – to write.

When Cyril Connolly spoke of the pram in the hall as an enemy of promise, he was apparently talking about men: the distractions and responsibilities of families for fathers. But we have not had a searchlight shone on what it means for women whose whole identity is bound up with their work to be forced to compromise for the sake of children.Some have argued that, in the past, the creative impulse in women produced babies while men had to make do with novels. But we know that, particularly today, if perhaps always, two conflicting creative impulses can coexist in one woman. Susan Johnson records this conflict in a way that answers questions that are fundamental to women’s lives.Her memoir is a dispatch from the front line. It records the relentless barrage of a child’s needs that prevent all but the most intrepid from making any headway into new territory. It also records the casualties: the way children and partners may suffer from a mother’s determination to do her thing. Nevertheless, it asserts the absolute need for a writer to write: her work is her survival And it spells out the difficulties.