{"id":22712,"date":"2013-09-01T02:07:40","date_gmt":"2013-09-01T08:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=22712"},"modified":"2018-12-18T11:17:42","modified_gmt":"2018-12-18T17:17:42","slug":"motherlunge-by-kirstin-scott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/motherlunge-by-kirstin-scott\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking Care of Your Genetic Material: Motherlunge by Kirstin Scott"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"motherlunge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The phrase \u201ctaking care of your genetic material\u201d first appears in Kirsten Scott\u2019s smart debut novel Motherlunge<\/em> through a father talking warningly to his son as the son begins to date seriously. But in the gynecological world of this novel where the female body is relentlessly inscribed with the bio-\/medical terminology of a textbook, the \u201cmaterial\u201d is a baby, the possibility of a baby and all that that means to the modern woman, in particular to the twenty-six-year-old narrator Thea.<\/p>\n

Motherlunge<\/em> is a full-frontal assault on every dappled, dimpled and doily-enhanced image we\u2019ve had of both women and mothers. Think Sandy or Orem, Utah\u2014scrubbed clean with culturally-defined markers of motherhood, riven with Victorian charms that are neither really Victorian or charming. Then think the opposite. That is Scott\u2019s literary world. That the story is also hysterically funny even as it makes you squirm, is a tribute to the writing\u2014an exquisite mix of the scalpel scraping along the physical curves of the female form and the cumulative, and ultimately sublime effects of pushing out another human onto a steel table:\u00a0 scrape and plop.<\/p>\n

Thea is the second daughter in a family of four from Montana. Mother Dorothy could never quite manage being a mom, taking to her bed soon after the birth of both her girls. Early on she\u2019s headed towards psychiatric care. Husband Walter is helpless on the scene, eventually booted out to his own place next to the local library where he works and finds refuge. So far American Gothic all around, it would seem. Then there are the girls. First Pavia, seemingly confident, definitely likable and also driven. After marrying, she\u2019s moved six or seven states away to a \u201cbig city\u201d that sounds a lot like Boston where, upon getting pregnant, she immediately separates from her husband Jack. This is where Thea comes in. She makes the trip east, settles into the town house with her sister and the now half-orbiting, very confused brother-in-law and a Great Dane pup the size of the original Honda to await the arrival of Xavier or \u201cX\u201d as he is often referred to in the book.<\/p>\n

This is telling. Is \u201cX\u201d for Xavier or for some unknown variable in an equation whose sum is simply \u201ccatalyst\u201d?<\/p>\n

The story is Thea\u2019s. The voice alternating between short chapters\u2014sort of expanded epigraphs, really of present-day, older Thea\u2014and the other, casing the narrative arc exploding from the catalyst babe. If Pavia is typical oldest child, Thea is definitely typical youngest:\u00a0 undisciplined, promiscuous, one who takes pot shots at everyone, archly clarifying her antecedents and wryly adding in the text \u201c(italics mine).\u201d<\/p>\n

Thea has a running commentary on everything and everyone: Jack, whom she might sleep with; her sometimes photographer boyfriend; the \u201cbig city\u201d; long-distance trucking couples; her hometown of Supernal, Montana\u2026you name it. Even her uterus, bafflingly empty considering that she lies all the time about being on birth control, gets called out. And this is where much of the humor and irony plays out in Motherlunge<\/em>. Even though she\u2019s a smartass, you can\u2019t help but find Thea compelling in her fragrant (and flagrant) observations that seem to characterize and carry along the whole of her tribe\u2014suburban, white, western. She is a product of coming of age in the \u201890s when the entire country was just entering its late-stage narcissism, captivated as it was by a semen-stained blue dress in the Oval Office. Clearly her sister Pavia is bee-lining for something more respectable than a dysfunctional family in a small, Big Sky town out west. She\u2019s vaguely aware of some kind of desire, but without ever any clear object that she might locate by going east.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I\u2019ve mentioned,\u201d says Thea early in the book, \u201cmy sister had always had the calmness characteristic of certain beautiful people. This population is characterized by the unfurrowed brow, the unhurried gait, the modulated and pleasant tone of voice. As a group, they probably sleep well. They are not nail biters; they do not pick their scabs. Their shirts maintain all original buttons. They make excellent corporate trainers, supermodels, and (I\u2019m thinking) ambassadors and ambassadors\u2019 wives. As sisters, they are reliable if inscrutable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thea, on the other hand, is self-described as being pretty much the opposite if not simply a reaction to what her sister is\u2014unable to say the right thing to her unraveling sister with the new baby and the estranged husband \u201cco-parent,\u201d as Pavia refers to him:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy couldn\u2019t I be a comfort?\u201d Thea asks. \u201cWhy did I always feel like something tipped over, poured out? I was like the cardboard canister held by the unsuspecting Morton Salt girl; my contents stung the ground in a granular line behind me.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet our heroine has a strange strength to her that Scott deftly threads throughout the story and which rings true throughout. Yes, Thea, who articulates life as a kind of mold-infested petri dish, or the viscera at an autopsy\u2014clinically delineated\u2014somehow manages to figure out what she really wants. As with Pavia, she\u2019s terrified that the DNA of mom will re-emerge as it seems to be doing for Pavia in Boston in her own lunge toward motherhood. But more to the point, she\u2019s terrified that to get to know her is to discover that she is ultimately unlovable.<\/p>\n

When Pavia pulls a Dorothy near the end of the book, Thea has her catharsis, a kind of ecstatic connection to not only her nephew, who is left to her care, but herself. \u201cOnly later,\u201d she says, \u201cdid I realize what I did want, namely, to be that baby myself. I was jealous of X. I was jealous of his fat satisfaction, his trust, the way he gazed\u2014unblinkingly, full of tolerance\u2014at the blurred ovoids of his parents\u2019 faces above him. And even if I did love X, he certainly didn\u2019t need me to. And so for the most part, I didn\u2019t show it.\u201d<\/p>\n

A mother is there for her child, but only through the \u201cdisfiguring crust of motherhood.\u201d This is what every mother, including the expecting Thea at book\u2019s end, must eventually know cannot be avoided.<\/p>\n

What does Thea want as she lunges toward the vortex that will claim her and probably not redeem her in the end, or at least not as she imagines redemption should look like? Motherlunge<\/em> is Thea\u2019s irreverent love story, as it were, for her unborn child.\u00a0 And what she does want has something to do with \u201cthe weird joy of overwhelming responsibility\u201d underscored\u2014or \u201cbacklit,\u201d as she says\u2014by sadness. And that is the fulcrum upon which Scott\u2019s brilliant and ultimately deeply satisfying treatment of motherhood rests. In the end the book is a gestation, culminating in the birth of a new world, a new heroine but without the cloying Hallmark-styling of mothers we routinely gaze upon when we should have, perhaps, been rooted in the smell of it, the terrifying biology and material of it.<\/p>\n

Motherlunge by Kirstin Scott<\/strong>
\nNew Issues Poetry & Prose (January 8, 2013)
\n248 pages
\n$11.10<\/p>\n

Winner of the 2011 AWP Prize for Novel \u00a0and the Utah Original Writing Competition, Kirsten Scott’s Motherlunge has also been short-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan prize for debut novel from the Center for Fiction<\/a>. Scott is a graduate of the University of Utah Creative Writing Program. Her short stories have appeared in\u00a0Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden\u2019s Ferry Review, Sonora Review, Western Humanities Review, PANK,\u00a0\u00a0and elsewhere. She works as a medical writer and lives in Salt Lake City with her family. She is currently working on a novel about a gynecologist named Ajax.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Utah Humanities Book Festival<\/a>, Utah\u2019s signature literary event, opens Sept. 10 and runs through October, National Book Month. During this statewide celebration of books and the literary arts, Kirsten Scott will appear in the following locations: <\/em>
\n Weller Book Works<\/strong> (607 Trolley Square, SLC) Saturday Oct. 7, at 4 pm. <\/em>
\n Logan Library<\/strong> (255 North Main) with poet Shanan Ballam (recently featured in 15 Bytes) Oct. 24 at 7 pm <\/em>
\n SLC City Public Library<\/strong> (downtown), also with Ballam, and in partnership with City Art on Wed., Oct. 23 at 7 pm. <\/em>
\n Art Access<\/strong>, 230 S. 500 W. #125, SLC, a discussion (moderated by Susan Anderson) of disability in Kirstin Scott’s novel Motherlunge is hosted by Art Access and the Disability and Literature Book Group on two dates: Wednesday, October 16, 6pm; Wednesday, October 30, 6pm.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The phrase \u201ctaking care of your genetic material\u201d first appears in Kirsten Scott\u2019s smart debut novel Motherlunge through a father talking warningly to his son as the son begins to date seriously. But in the gynecological world of this novel where the female body is relentlessly inscribed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":834,"featured_media":22713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[1639],"class_list":["post-22712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-kirstin-scott"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/motherlunge.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-01 10:40:17","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22712"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41920,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22712\/revisions\/41920"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}