New motherhood is a subject rich for memoir, with writers such as Rachel Cusk, Anne Lamott and Meaghan O’Connell reflecting on this significant time. Local journalist Sinead Corcoran Dye’s first book moves in similar territory, though it has more in common with Australian psychologist Ariane Beeston’s Because I’m Not Myself, You See, because soon after the birth of daughter Vivie, Corcoran Dye was admitted to what she jokingly refers to as the “clinky linky”. Better known as Starship Hospital’s specialist Mother and Baby Unit, it is a ward “with only three beds for the mums with the most critical cases of PND [postnatal depression] in the northern regions”.
It Nearly Killed Me But I Love You is raw and unflinching, moving through Corcoran Dye’s diagnosis with depersonalisation/ derealisation disorder (DPDR), the loss of her mother when she was 22, plus her marriage to an older man who was her boss and their struggles with fertility, followed by severe morning sickness during the course of her pregnancy.
The first part of the book focuses mostly on Corcoran Dye’s pregnancy and subsequent hospitalisation. It reads like a storyline on the television show Girls: one of the characters partners up with an older man who already has two kids, struggles to get pregnant, is punishingly sick for nine months, and then, after a Caesarean section birth, soils herself in the Birthcare ensuite bathroom.
Corcoran Dye herself sees the similarities. During the worst times, she felt she needed to make jokes to lighten the mood, “to make the whole experience feel like an inane sitcom episode”. There are a lot of jokes in the book – kooky listicles such as “3am maternity leave Google searches” and “apps you need and apps you must delete”. The writing style is chatty and cute – “obviously” is shortened to “obv”.
These stylistic choices push back against a more earnest telling of the story, which may be an act of self-preservation – the book was written between Vivie’s birth and her first birthday. There’s been little time for healing and no time to digest what has occurred. The chapter titled “My last will and testament” includes a letter to her husband, asking him to explain to his daughter in the future, should Sinead be gone, that she need not act like the “personality hire”.
Corcoran Dye doesn’t want her daughter to try to “make [things] fun and funny for everyone”. It’s a message she is hopefully telling herself, too: she doesn’t have to tell her story in a way that makes it all enjoyable and amusing.
Because at its core, this isn’t a very humorous situation. Statistics cited in the book claim a third of mothers consider the birth of their child to be psychologically traumatic, which in New Zealand means about 50 mothers a day. Severe episodes of DPDR, a rare condition where individuals feel detached from reality from their own bodies and experiences, saw Corcoran Dye stop work. To address it, she’s tried “multiple types of therapy and countless combinations of medications”, but when she became pregnant, she had to stop taking everything.
Although people with no previous history of mental illness also suffer postnatal depression, having an earlier diagnosis raises the likelihood significantly, so when Sinead came off her meds, where was the medical oversight? The book highlights an important issue in New Zealand: the real and urgent need for better mental healthcare for new parents.
The brutal honesty in the book is likely to help new mothers immensely; the detailed description of how Corcoran Dye felt after Vivie’s birth will be a wake-up call for fathers, too, a portion of whom might think their partners “need to snap out of it”. Some of the honesty is included for comedic value, such as when Corcoran Dye admits giving her husband a fashion makeover on their second date because he turned up wearing something she hated, but some accounts are alarming – such as the admission she dropped her anxiety medication on the ground three times, and each time her infant daughter ate it. Did this happen, or is it another joke, part of the author’s need to make it “fun and funny”? Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
There are fewer jokes in the chapter titled “My Wonderful Wife is Cursed, by Stuart Dye” written by her husband. His thoughts are included, possibly to prove how bad it was, and that Corcoran Dye isn’t doing a James Frey or The Salt Path-style memoir and imagining extra drama for the narrative. It’s in this chapter that the almost ceaselessly “fun and funny” voice of Sinead gives way to a line that succinctly and affectingly encapsulates the difficulties they faced: “It was cold and desperately, desperately sad.”
It Nearly Killed Me but I Love You, by Sinead Corcoran Dye (Moa Press, $39.99), is out now.
