We chat with author Helen Monks Takhar about her latest release, Such a Good Mother, which is a razor-sharp take on modern motherhood and the myth of having it all.
Hi, Helen! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Why do I find this question so intimidatingly open?…
I’m going tackle it by saying I’m a happy and optimistic writer, wife and mother fixated on the darkest and most repellent female impulses for reasons I’m never quite able to understand.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I don’t know I ever thought I love writing in the early days.
I started my first ever manuscript in 2003 to see if I could write sustained prose and find out if I had anything to say. That got as far as a couple of kindly agent rejections.
Manuscript two didn’t even get this far.
Manuscript three was so weird I didn’t let it leave the laptop, but by then I suppose I already loved writing enough because I bounced straight into manuscript four.
That one became my debut Precious You (PRH/HQ 2020).
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
Reading books that moved me as a child didn’t make me think I should or could aim to do the same, but a book I read as a teenager that stayed with me for a very long time (and I keep thinking I should re-read) is Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor. It’s about societal breakdown and reform, kind of mystical. I loved it then and expect I would now.
Your new novel, Such A Good Mother, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
I need only three: Scarface for Mums.
What can readers expect?
A diverse cast of complicated women face-off in a socially-aware school gates twist-fest.
Where did the inspiration for Such A Good Mother come from?
From the second you get pregnant it feels like there’s a queue of people ready to tell you how you’re doing it wrong, or (here in the UK, at least) silently judge you. I’m sad to say it’s often other women ever-ready with the critique, likely only doing so to mask the fact they’re ultimately worried they’re doing an even shittier job than you are.
There so much guilt and competitiveness from the get-go. The absolute extremism over things like breastfeeding, weaning style, whether to use a pacifier etc I find pretty dark, and this fetishization of how to be a ‘good mother’ seems to only mutate into new and different territrorities as your child ages.
I still don’t really know why women do this to each other. (Suspect it’s just another function of the patriarchy, getting women to do their work for them; usually is.)
I feel I should also say that, of course, mums can – and have in my own experience – be invaluably supportive to each, but if you want fictionalised accounts of such good behaviour, I’m really not the writer for you.
Can you tell us a bit about the challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
The first draft was so poor I was told I’d have to trash it. In lockdown.
Deep down, I think I was kind of expecting it, but I can tell you, there was some ugly crying in the spring of 2020 that wasn’t completely down to homeschooling my daughters with my husband.
I got through it all with some very patient and brilliant editors and the unending support of my girl Lana Del Rey (Norman F*cking Rockwell on repeat).
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
My lead Rose is really complicated, despite her simple, humble appearance. She’s someone who’s trying to answer those fundamental questions: “Am I destined to turn into my parent?”, “Am I fundamentally good, or essentially bad?” The story of Such A Good Mother forces her to decide which it is.
Were there any ‘must-haves’ you wanted to incorporate when it came to writing your novel, such as tropes, topics, characteristics etc?
I think I write best when I make myself sit with the deeply uncomfortable.
I explain in my Author’s Note, probably in common with many women, despite apparent successes, I still carry around specific feelings of shame and inferiority.
This is the dirt I made myself play in for Such A Good Mother.
Being a working mum, like my protagonist Rose, is, sadly, fertile ground on which shame and notions of inferiority are liable to flourish.
This is your second published novel. Were there any differences between writing Precious You and Such A Good Mother?
I drafted Precious You when no one was looking and it was one of those stories that felt like it wrote itself, as though was only trying to keep up with the cat-and-mouse games of my leads Katherine and Lily.
By Such A Good Mother, I was lucky enough to be very much watched from the off by my wonderful editors in the US and UK, and…I kind of got the twisties. I went for something that cost me my sense of story and readability. I had to rewrite it pretty much twice to arrive at a draft strong enough to warrant line and copy edits.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
The best advice I’ve heard wasn’t from a writer, but from Jimmy Iovine in the documentary The Defiant Ones about the partnership between him and Dr. On how he innovates in music and business, Iovine talks about racehorses wearing blinkers. They don’t worry about what the horses to their left and right are doing, they just, “Go, go, go.”
It’s so easy to get distracted, and, OK, downhearted, by what other writers are doing, especially when they’re doing it with panache and commercial success. But in the end, the race is only with yourself (thanks to Baz Lurhmann/Mary Schmich for this pearl), so all you can do is keep writing and try to get better at it.
I’m also watching Get Back currently, taking a lot of inspiration, as one does, from Paul McCartney. We see him toying with a new riff, or a tune, and at first he only makes sounds over the rhythm, or maybe says Henry Cooper into the beats on the road to creating those inevitably seminal songs. I’m all for starting with the dirty draft, and it seems to have worked out pretty well for Sir Paul too.
The worst advice is that I’ve given myself: Book two is definitely the right time to experiment with narrative style and what constitutes a thriller. See earlier answers on challenges.
What’s next for you?
I’m about to edit thriller three, drafting thriller four and am writing a cross-cultural, time-travelling romance in reverse with my husband Danny Takhar (and wishing very much I was some kind of self-replicating Doctor Manhattan – I have so much more I’d like to write in other genres).
Lastly, do you have any 2022 book recommendations for our readers?
I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of Kirsten Miller’s The Change (William Morrow/HQ) and, holy hell, it is phenomenal. Menopausal women wreaking revenge on the killers of women through their super-natures. I absolutely love this book and recommend it to anyone who asks for book tips (and a great many who don’t). Also, if you’re in the market for something Christie-esque, look no further than Louise Hare’s Miss Alridge Regrets (PRH/HQ) set on the The Queen Mary as it sets sail from London to New York in 1936. It’s very stylish and singular while hitting those locked-box murder-mystery tropes.
