How to survive the panic years

A comic memoir exposes the darkest thoughts of a 30-year-old single woman

THE PANIC YEARS by Nell Frizzell

336pp, Bantam, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £7.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

You might think a woman describing her 48-hour labour over no fewer than 20 pages and through a rainbow of adjectives so gruesome they wouldn’t look out of place in a crime scene would surely put any child-free woman off pregnancy for life. But somehow, relayed by Nell Frizzell in her memoir The Panic Years, it is one of the most gripping, beautiful and euphoric glimpses of motherhood that I have ever read. Who ever said babies were boring?

Frizell coined the term “The Panic Years” while going through a destabilising state of flux in her late 20s. She was single while most of her friends were settling down, and barely making ends meet as an assistant editor of a small online arts magazine. Approaching her 30th birthday, Frizzell – who had dreamt of having a baby since she was eight years old – saw her body as a giant egg-timer: as every second passed, she imagined her fertility running out. The Panic Years, she writes, were “a reckoning of sex, money, power and biology.”

With her life under the microscope, Frizzell examines each scene

for clues. Were her parents – so unhappily married that they managed to build their entire patio out of crockery broken during arguments – the reason she couldn’t find a compatible partner? Was the handblown glass baby she almost dropped at an art exhibition a morbid sign of things to come?

Thankfully not, and the climactic chapter Frizzell dedicates to her son’s birth is a wonderfully cathartic undoing of the knot at the book’s core. This isn’t a spoiler – Frizzell references her long-awaited son from the get-go, bouncing between time frames and memories by the page. The ping-pong plot does, at times, lend this poignant memoir the frustratingly chaotic tone of someone unable to find the right starting point for an anecdote at a dinner party. Baffling, too, is Frizzell’s curious but maddeningly frequent use of overblown simile: “sniffling like a hand blender”, “crying like a fire in the sun”.

That said, her silly delight in the playful possibilities of the English language is what makes her such an engaging and endearing narrator, and protects her memoir from the pitfalls of ostentatiousness and melodrama. I couldn’t help but chuckle, for instance, imagining her “struggling to put on a pair of knickers while doubled over like a shrimp” or when she describes realising the man she is dating is an unhinged conspiracy theorist with the “grim acceptance of a cow sliding down a polished slope”.

Frizzell is at her best, however, when getting right under her own skin and digging out the twisted feelings of resentment, jealousy and shame that gnaw at so many women going through The Panic Years. She tells of how she howled with tears while watching the first dance at her best friend’s wedding and admits posting a glossed-up version of her child-free life to Instagram in the hope that exhausted new mothers would turn green with envy. Some women will shudder to see their darkest thoughts exposed so plainly on the page – but I imagine most will breathe a giant sigh of relief.

Baby crazy: Nell Frizzell began to see her body as a giant egg-timer