Author Chantal Braganza’s Story of Your Mother is told in fragments, much of it addressed to Braganza’s older son as she recounts their first years together.Penguin Random House/Supplied
The literary appetite for motherhood narratives is bottomless these days, to judge by the feverish reception accompanying recent titles like Miranda July’s novel All Fours and Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters.
Chantal Braganza’s initial idea – to write a straightforward book of essays on “the culture of motherhood,” she says – would have fit neatly into this ever-expanding genre. Instead, Story of Your Mother is something looser in structure and harder to classify: an expansive hybrid of memoir and essay exploring identity, labour and care, which manages to be both intellectually rigorous and compulsively readable.
For a child, Braganza writes, a word like mama “is for a singular person, and represents a singular relationship.” But for the mother, the word denotes “a role, often with prescriptions. Perhaps this knowledge sometimes gets in the way.”
Early on, she conformed to expectations by describing “how motherhood made me feel, to the exclusion of asking why, or how, these feelings and their causes related to the world around me.” But in Story of Your Mother, she interrogates whether “mother” and its synonyms might hold vaster possibilities: a way of understanding the wider world, “infinitely interpretable.”
Braganza, the daughter of a Kenyan-born Goan father and a Mexican mother, sketches vignettes of her parents’ early lives and improbable meeting, along with her own childhood in Mississauga, a place where “most people were, generationally recently, from somewhere.”
Presently a deputy editor of food at Chatelaine, she has a Proustian affinity for describing memorable dishes: the “cinnamon-flecked sugar skins” she would peel off of Mexican breakfast rolls before dousing the rest in coffee and milk; the salchichas her mother cooked, tiny meatballs squeezed from sausage casings; the sourdough starter she received from a stranger on Facebook Marketplace (in exchange for lip balm) that turns into cheese rolls and pancakes on the toughest days of new motherhood.
Many of the book’s most vivid and moving passages recall Braganza’s childhood visits to her grandmother’s house in Puerto Vallarta, with its huge wooden door and a courtyard of “baked peach and white bougainvillea.” The book revisits these origin stories again and again, as Braganza reconsiders their meaning in the light of her own evolving perspective as a mother.
“I have been thinking about return as a form of reproduction,” she writes. “One story, told many times over, each one a little true.”
Penguin Random House/Supplied
Story of Your Mother is told in fragments, much of it addressed to Braganza’s older son as she recounts their first years together. Among the many literary references in the essays – Jamaica Kincaid, Maggie Nelson, Rachel Cusk – is the influence of Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life, adapted for the 2016 film Arrival.
The story is narrated by Louise, a linguist, to her unborn daughter. While learning an alien language, Louise develops the ability to see the future and learns the entire arc of her daughter’s tragically short life before she is even conceived. “In inhabiting both, for Louise the past becomes as mutable as the future; specific memories take on new significance and become as vital as her present,” writes Braganza.
Story of Your Mother pulls off the same narrative trick in non-fiction, layering past and present to reveal the fluid relationships between them. Braganza chronicles her first pregnancy and miscarriage, the birth and early months with her older son, the Biblical plague of daycare viruses and the daily ministrations of infant care for which, she writes, “your body becomes the instrument of two selves.”
Woven between precise recollections of feeling “the crunch of a tiny palmful of Cheerios” in one’s shoes are critical essays and cultural theory, flashes of personal history and remembered conversations from her own childhood. “I like books that you can open up at any point and find they still make sense. You don’t necessarily need to start at the beginning,” she says. It is also, she adds, “a useful way to read” for someone with very young children and a correspondingly limited attention span.
The pandemic, which began shortly after Braganza began working on the book, shaped both its content and creation. In the mass retreat to the domestic sphere, it became starkly obvious how reliant society is on the unpaid, unrecognized and hidden labour of mothers and other caregivers, a rupture that changed how Braganza approached her subject.
As an organizing principle, she says, “motherhood can be an entry point for asking questions about how things are arranged, and how might they be made better?”
Writing took place in the snippets of time available to the mother of one and then two young children during a time of massive global disruption: “in the evenings after nursing, in my mind or on my phone during nursing.” The book’s fragmentary form mirrors that process, which also allowed Braganza to capture the quicksilver quality of those fleeting early years in arresting and lucid detail.
“There are some benefits to that,” she says, “being able to talk about the experience at a granular level, the things that don’t necessarily stay with you 10 years on.”
In 2023, she was able to take a few weeks off from work to finish the manuscript, arranging the essays into their final sequence.
Braganza’s parents, both central figures in the book, read it in advance. Her dad, she says, offered substantial feedback. One letter, in which he corrects an offhand anecdote that Braganza told her son about a brief gig he had delivering Swiss Chalet, is included in full. “That’s the nature of who he is,” she says.
Her mom, she adds, had fewer edits. “She was like, ‘Great, this is nice,’” she laughs, adding that their feelings might change over time. “But for now I’m happy with what they think of it. And I’m grateful they’ve been okay with me writing about them as well.”
Story of Your Mother contemplates parenting as palimpsest, a narrative etched over the one written by those who parented you; in this way, it is the closest you can come to seeing your own life through their eyes.
Recalling the sounds of her mother and father bustling around the house on weekend mornings when she was a teenager, Braganza writes that she wonders what her own home will sound like when her children are older, already nostalgic for this fleeting era of early mornings and clattering feet. “A period when, as much as labour and label, motherhood constituted a form of time travel. They taught me this.”
