The Nursery

Description

A “brilliant…essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood” (The New York Times) and the early postpartum days, following a woman struggling with maternal fear and its looming madness and showing how difficult and fragile those days can be—and how vital love is to pull anyone out from the dark

“A radical novel…I’m obsessed with this book.” —Jessamine Chan, New York Times bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers

There is the before and the after. Withering in the maternal prison of her apartment, a new mother finds herself spiraling into a state of complete disaffection. As a translator, she is usually happy to spend her days as the invisible interpreter. But now home alone with her newborn, she is ill at ease with this state of perpetual giving, carrying, feeding. The instinct to keep her baby safe conflicts with the intrusive thoughts of causing the baby harm, and she struggles to reclaim her identity just as it seems to dissolve from underneath her.

Feeling isolated from her supportive but ineffectual husband, she strikes up a tentative friendship with her ailing upstairs neighbour, Peter, who hushes the baby with his oxygen tank in tow. But they are both running out of time; something is soon to crack. Joyful early days of her pregnancy mingle with the anxious arrival of the baby, and culminate in a painful confrontation – mostly, between our narrator and herself. Striking and emotive, The Nursery documents the slow process of staggering back towards the simple pleasures of life and reentering the world after post-partum depression. “Brilliant . . . an essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood . . . . Molnar’s book, with its nameless protagonist and oppressive non-eventfulness and cool prose, suggests the work of a number of contemporaries — Ottessa Moshfegh, Sheila Heti — but in the end it’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ that’s the most apt shelfmate. We are watching a consciousness unravel.”
—New York Times

“Molnar has written a daring and much-needed novel that has some of the hothouse, unflinching quality of Sylvia Plath’s late poetry…A powerful brew of a novel, emitting unpleasant sights, smells, and emotions that are rarely captured in print; it is frequently disquieting in its brutal, insistent candor.”
—Atlantic

“Molnar’s debut, about the first few sleep-decimated weeks in the life of a new mother…brings this particularly mind-eviscerating state of affairs into startlingly sharp relief in this uncompromising novel. And yet this is also an oddly affirmative novel, alive with a dangerous self-aware humor.”
—Daily Mail

“Molnar’s wellspring is universal; her features are particularly of our moment; and her flourishes of darkness let in the sublime…The Nursery deserves to be widely read.”
—Compact Magazine

“Told with radical honesty and emotional precision, The Nursery is an essential addition to the growing canon of literary works reckoning with the complexities of motherhood.”
—The Millions

“The Nursery dares to question the inviolable dictates of a mother’s love when a human is reduced to her suffering”
—BOMB Magazine (Editor’s Choice)

“An important, unromanticized look at the instant, drastic changes new motherhood can bring”
—Library Journal

“Molnar’s entrancing debut captures the volatile inner life of a woman with postpartum depression…a powerful look at what a new mother endures.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A searing portrait of postpartum motherhood written with visceral prose…powerful and haunting.”
—Debutiful (“Best Books of 2023 so far”)

“A radical novel…Szilvia Molnar’s astounding debut demonstrates that the intricate workings of the female mind deserve our most reverent attention. I’m obsessed with this book.”  
—Jessamine Chan, New York Times bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers

“An essential, singular contribution to the literature of mothering as a human, embodied, fundamentally existential experience.”
—Merritt Tierce, author of Love me Back

“The Nursery dares to put a woman’s body at the center of the story, a book as frightening as it is profound, as gory as it’s beautiful, a reeling vision of postpartum experience unlike any.” 
—Louisa Hall, author of Speak and Trinity

“With unsparing, hypnotic, and fearless prose, Szilvia Molnar captures the texture, rhythms, and agonies of the post-partum body and mind. The Nursery is a work of devastating elegance.”
—Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
 
“A concise, powerful novel on bringing art and life into the world, by a beautiful prose stylist. Molnar’s precision and phenomenal ear for language gives us new words for the oldest experience.”
—Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State

“Szilvia Molnar’s portrait of the postpartum world is ruthlessly true and exacting. It was electrifying to experience the days of early motherhood through Molnar’s razor sharp realism and wit.”
—Rita Bullwinkel, author of Belly Up: Stories

“Szilvia Molnar’s debut is a fierce psychological novel…The Nursery is powered by the shape of Molnar’s imagination but also the brutal truth of personal experience.”
—Jessica Anthony, author of Enter the AardvarkSZILVIA MOLNAR is the foreign rights director at a New York-based literary agency, and author of a chapbook called Soft Split. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Lit Hub, Triangle House Review, Two Serious Ladies, The Buenos Aires Review, and Neue Rundschau. Szilvia is from Budapest and was raised in Sweden. She lives in Austin, Texas.As hard as it can, the August sun pushes itself into our small apartment on the third floor. The baby I hold in my arms is a leech, let’s call her Button. Button is crying. She recently entered the world, violently and directly. We are alone and cocooned in our two- bedroom apartment until we are not, because there’s a knock on the door. The foreign sound makes Button cry harder and makes me unsure of what to do. I have been a mother for as long as Button has been outside of me, and I have yet to embrace the title as much as I have had to embrace her.
 
Here, the air is motionless, the light is direct, and sounds echo off the walls. I’m sweating.
 
I place Button in a cushioned container by the couch in the living room and she makes disappointed sounds, large and unkind. I make a different decision. I pick her up and move my robe to the side as I bring her body across my chest. It’s a motion that I still fumble through, her weight is alien to what my mind expects to hold and my own body heats up another notch. Smells on us and around us bring attention to themselves, I am brought to discomfort and cringe at my current state. The day has been long and lonely.
 
One arm and a hand control the body of the baby, the other unclicks the nursing bra to get the breast out. My nipple shines dark brown in the late afternoon light and I am reminded that the golden hour is my favorite hour to walk around in the city where we reside.
 
###
 
Before Button arrived, I walked everywhere and leaving the apartment was a simple undertaking. During a break from the library or my writing desk where most of my work takes place, I often ventured out onto the busy streets and hoped that the beat of the city would kick a word or two out in front of me, some phrase, idea, or feeling that could be of use for whatever text I was translating at the time.
 
After almost ten years as a translator, my work was still mostly a struggle. Not necessarily the work itself, because there was pleasure in trying to get it “right” (a faulty concept that is still thrown around among fellow colleagues). Chameleoning my way forward was enjoyable, but the continuous fight for more money, grants, or God- forbid a royalty check was tiring. I wasn’t the kind of translator to care but needed money as much as the next. Being in the periphery of the industry was also fine— the peculiar competitiveness mostly amused me. By now I knew a handful of editors who found me reliable and writers who liked my way of working. My recent translations were even getting accolades in the general press, which meant my name also occasionally appeared on book covers. Sometimes I would find the authors profiled in glossy magazines wearing thick wool sweaters, posing with brooding looks directed into the rugged Scandinavian landscape. Like any other ordinary person, I am too vain to deny that I didn’t want to be photographed in the same cool milieu, but ultimately, I’m not the competitive kind. Visibility is not my desire.
 
I wasn’t yet an orphan, but I had been moving away from family for so long that at some point I was walking away from the past, perhaps only to find myself content in the present. In literal terms, this meant making a modest life for myself in the States as a translator of Swedish literature.
 
As the sun is setting, I must leave these thoughts behind; I am here with Button and this is all I am. This is the doing, me being here.
 
With a hand on the back of her head, I put her face toward my nipple and a toothless mouth opens. She latches on with lips soft as a fish. I squirm from the initial discomfort of her bite.
 
Most of the time I don’t know what I am doing. Button gets pushed so close to the breast that she may have a hard time breathing. Frustration arrives in her small bundle of a body and she screams, but her squeal is not loud enough to overpower the second round of knocking on the door. She makes me nervous. I wrangle with my arms. Again, there’s knocking, harder. Again, I don’t know what to do.
 
In a different state and in a different world I would have ignored the interruption and moved on with my life, and if I was expecting someone, I would have been prepared. Perhaps I can pretend that I’m getting ready for bed, make the robe appropriate and retie my hair. Perhaps I can blame my disheveled appearance on Button. Perhaps I can decide to never deal with the outside world again and perhaps whoever is behind the door can relieve me of this discomfort. Perhaps, in this battle, the choice has already been made for me. I maneuver us toward the entrance and Button finally sucks rhythmically in between breaths. Her repetitive movements remind me of breaststrokes under water. As she slowly fills on the comfort brought from the milk, her body turns tranquil and gives in to satisfaction. I take a deep breath.US

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