Exploring the primal emotions of parenting
Soon after the birth of her first child, Helen Phillips encountered a brief, minor incident while she was home alone, nursing her baby.
“I heard a sound in the other room,” she recalls. “And it was nothing, but I had this primal feeling of: ‘Wait a second. I had never thought of it before: What would I do if I was here, in this situation — naked, nursing my child — and someone came in and there was an intruder?’”
Partly inspired by this question, Phillips’ latest novel, “The Need,” opens on a similar scene: Molly, a mother of two, scrambles to hold her children near, frightened at the sound of a potential intruder. But in the fictional scenario, Molly’s sense of certainty on the source of the sound, her grasp of reality, feels more tenuous. The protagonist’s experience of motherhood — raising a newborn boy and a 4yearold daughter — has been overwhelming and disorienting.
“I wanted to try to write about — it’s hard to capture — when you have young children, what that love feels like in your body,” Phillips says. That can be meant in a literal sense. The title of Phillips’ book refers to a range of dependency that motherhood elicits, including “the need for a baby to have milk. That’s sort of the most fundamental need that we all are born with. There’s also probably the most driving or threatening need in the book — the need for Molly to have her children back.”
In her book, motherhood and its love is at once primal and magical, mundane and bizarre — and, perhaps most of all, the source of the deepest possible fear. Following that initial sound Molly encounters, the rest of the book, paced out in short, rapidfire chapters, plays out as a taut thriller. A threat to her children does ultimately manifest, but from an unsettling and unexpected place, as the story eventually takes genrebending turns.
“I didn’t say, ‘OK, I really wanted to write a thriller, what’s a good conceit for a thriller?’ It was the other way around,” Phillips says. “Amid the daytoday exhaustion of having children — which is exhausting — how do you cherish that?”
In “The Need,” the daily demands of raising a child suddenly become sacred and precious when it is thrown into peril. The dichotomies of this experience are themes Phillips hasn’t seen articulated often.
“One thing that I was trying to express in the book that I was craving to see reflected in other works as a reader is just the way that the love you have for these tiny children and the anxiety you feel about their wellbeing just go hand in hand,” she says. “Maybe I’m an overly neurotic mother or something — I try to not be — but nothing can prepare you for that sense of responsibility for someone else’s wellbeing.”
Phillips’ novel does not turn out to be a tale strictly reflecting the ferocity of a mother’s love. Instead, aspects of scifi and speculative fiction upend the narrative, complicating what Phillips sees as tests of empathy for Molly.
That empathy leads to a sense of gratitude. Amid its elements of terror and sadness, the book, Phillips hopes, inspires a sense of appreciation in its readers, those with or without children.
“Your mundane life that you take for granted — maybe you should try to cherish it more every day and just realize that these little moments that can just pass away from you, you might want to cling onto them,” she says. “Because imagine if they were threatened.”