Reading Elif Shafak’s book is like reading love letters from your beloved ones. You couldn’t get enough of them. You keep repeating the same sentences over and over again as if you are scared the moment you move on to the next one, you might forget all about it and you couldn’t bear the idea of forgetting it. You couldn’t stop smiling either, as your eyes dancing on the letters, you imagine them sitting close beside you, listening to you, reading their words. Sometimes, you get so emotional that you couldn’t stop crying over it, either because the sad stories they been told, or because you’re touched with their words which reflect pure sincerity. For me, it is always the latter. Those letters always feel like warm hugs and could draw a happy smile over my face. That’s how brilliant her books are.
Black Milk is her second book I read and I’d rate it 9.5/10. It is a non – fiction one, somewhat a memoir of her early life before being a mother and the early months after being a mother. It basically brings you on tours of two. The first part will bring you closer on womanhood, motherhood and authorship. The second part discusses the lives and works of various women writers, in past and present, seeing on how they dealt with similar topics, successfully or unsuccessfully. You may know their names or their works but getting to know how they live their life could be another thing. This book is the story of how Elif Shafak faced her 6 inner voices; struggling and negotiating with them most of the times and then learned to be One. (I’ll try elaborating more regarding these mental voices on my next time review, The Untethered Soul by Michael A.Singer)
This book tells us about how at first she really against the idea of getting married, fretting if the phase might burden her to pursue her writing passionately like she currently does. She tried her best to make peace with all her inner voices which most of them against her getting married yet a part of her wanted to experience it and have babies of her own. Things started to change when she met Eyub, who has all the opposite sides of her and out of her control, Elif fell in love with him.
“Elif, I stopped expecting anything normal from you the day you quoted Neil Gaiman as your motto on love. We will do the best we can. You will be the nomad, I will be the settler. You will bring me magic fruits from lands afar, I will grow oranges for you in the backyard. We will find balance.” (Eyub)
After 2 years married to Eyub, she got pregnant with their first baby. Her pregnancy journal was so fun to read and the contents are so hilarious as she was being forced to do all the unusual things; listening to all the nature sounds instead of listening to her music preferences; punk, postpunk and industrial metal.
After giving birth to her beautiful daughter, she suffered postpartum depression and writer’s block for almost a year. I love the way she addressed this postpartum depression issue in this book since it is rarely discussed (I believe so) among our society since it is a taboo issue. She was fighting this alone since Eyub had to abroad for months. As she said, the only way to get away from problems is to acknowledge them. This book told me a lot about her and the writers she lived for.
A beautiful one if you want to try a different genre than your usual ones. For my case, I wanted to understand better, get a good a picture about motherhood, this postpartum depression thingy and those obstacles that might be on my way. This book is not just for woman, but also for everyone who finds it difficult, at times, to balance the multiplicity of roles and responsibility in lives.
#AiniMentariReads
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