This book is told in a non-linear way with titles such as - 7 and +3 to indicate whether it's occurring during pregnancy, birth or after the baby has arrived. Some of it was a bit poetic for me but the majority I found interesting, as someone who is not a mother (and also does not wish to be one). Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of the book.

This book is so beautiful and so evocative of the dreamlike state of having a newborn.
It took me right back to nights of breastfeeding a baby while wrestling with my grip on reality.

This was a beautifully written and brutally honest story that kept me engaged the entire way through. Even though I don’t have children, I still found parts of the book relatable, and parents will find this all the more relatable. Well worth the read!

a mix of memoir, short essays and vignettes about her experience of becoming pregnant and becoming a mother. Interspersed with this is musings on the specificity of being a mother in Ireland, with its particularly complicated history. I found this book very intense, anxiety-inducing and a bit scary; it makes the idea of having children quite off-putting if I'm honest. Milk definitely offers no clear-cut answers or conclusions: I don't really know how I feel about it, but it was an interesting book to read at the age of 29 when it feels like half the people I know from school are having babies and the rest are thinking about it.

Milk : On Motherhood and Madness by Alice Kinsella

I found this book very emotional to read. Perhaps because I am mum to three girls with my youngest only just turned two and still breastfeeding/cosleeping so I could really identify with a lot of what was written. The book is described by the author near the start as not being fiction but not fact either. It spans the author’s pregnancy and her son’s early life. The writing is beautiful and Alice Kinsella doesn’t shy away from mentioning difficult topics such as mother and baby homes. This book is a celebration of what it means to be a mother and well worth a read.

Thank you to the author, publisher and netgalleyUK for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

#netgalleyuk #scottishreader #irishbookstagram

A book about motherhood and madness. I thought this was going to be right up my street as I love reading about people's experiences with motherhood, especially the early days. This book follows the first 9 months of Alice Kinsella's baby's life, along with snapshots of her pregnancy and further back.

At the beginning it says it is neither full fact nor fiction and I think that's really interesting. Unfortunately I struggled to get into this book. It's compiled of short passages from different points in time such as +8, -4 referencing pregnancy and how long after the birth (birth is 0). I found a lot of it to be quite repetitive and whilst it made me reflect on my own experiences and there were passages that really resonated with me, in general I didn't particularly enjoy the reading experience as a whole and felt the book was long, taking me ages to read although it was only 320 pages.

An interesting book of different parts, combining to portray (as the title suggests) on motherhood. Mainly memoir, jumping to points before and after birth as a way on reflecting on experiences and personal change, with short prose elements that often crystalise ideas in sharper ways. Together with sections on aspects of the history of motherhood and women in Ireland, based from both personal and broader experience. Whilst things are improved in that regard it feels there is a way to go.

The most interest part of this are the personal - the experiences of being a new parent and how this changes people, expected/intended ways or not. Primarily change in themselves, but also in the perception of others as the 'motherchild' unit. Highlighting the need for greater understanding and awareness beyond the gaze of close family and fellow parents, and the need for greater support and understanding in some areas of the health service as well as the population.

It did feel a little long, with a degree of repetition of themes toward the end. It could have easily lost 50 pages or so to give a shorter, sharper work. Leaving that aside, highly recommend for it's writing and insights.

Sometimes a book comes along just at the right time. It speaks to you and articulates feelings that you might not have had words for yet or that you didn’t even realise you were feeling.

With Milk: On Motherhood and Madness, Alice Kinsella illustrates perfectly the completely overwhelming experience that becoming a new mother is. The lack of sleep, the constant uncertainty (are they breathing? Are they too warm? Too cold?), the feeling of inadequacy (why are we suddenly expected to have mothering instincts? Why don’t I have them instantly? How do I pick this small bundle up? Why is he crying?). Your brain is whirring at a million miles a minute in those first weeks (mine still is, but now I’ve moved on to new worries as he moves towards crawling and weaning off breastfeeding).

There were so many moments when reading this book where I stopped to re-read sentences. It’s a fantastic, moving and honest piece of work. One I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.

I’ll finish with this: I’ve spent the past ten days in Galway with my son (bonding time for the “outside-Dublin” grandparents). One night/morning at approx. 3am, Mom checked on us when he woke up crying and I read her this quote from Alice Kinsella’s Milk: “I take my mother for granted. I think I always have. I do it. Mum, can you? Mum, would you hold the baby while I? […] My mother, letting me be a child again, so that I can become a mother”.

With this book, Alice Kinsella is joining a new literary tradition in Ireland: the mother memoir. This book is clearly inspired by Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat (the standard) and Kerri Ní Dhocartaigh's writing, but Kinsella's voice seems younger somehow, she seems a generation closer to the current day.

The book is made up of fragments, jumping dizzily from episode to episode, clearly intended to mimic the frenzied thoughts of new motherhood. A particularly moving piece of the book conveys her desperation to be remembered, to be important and not "just" a mother. Her interweaving of the passive creation of her son and the active creation of her writing is deftly handed and it is clear Kinsella is a fan of Maggie Nelson, as her fragmented lines are very close in style.

I will be recommending this book to the Mother Book Club at my work (the local library), as I know they will love it.
Thank you to Picador for the e-galley.

This has been a wild run - thought-provoking, scary, overwhelming and yet I enjoyed it! I was not sure what to make of "Milk", this stream of consciousness of a young woman who is suddenly a mother, not just that, but this new creature - a "motherbaby" - somebody who cannot sleep, eat, rest, but has to "survive" in fear. Alice Kinsella's short novel is a meditation on love, life, responsibility and our place on this planet. I really enjoyed it and was moved to tears on a couple of occasions.

It starts a bit slow and confusing. Persevere!

I thought this was a very interesting read. I wasn't sure how I was going to relate as I'm not yet a mother but want to be so I was worried it would be triggering but it wasn't, in my opinion its accessible for all. The writing is very good, I've read that the author is a poet, which is evident in the language and how captivating it is. Really enjoyed this!

From its opening pages, Milk: On Motherhood and Madness, already feels like the kind of cult classic that will in time be passed from friend to friend, pressed into hands earnestly, taking hold of readers’ hearts.

Milk will soon take up its rightful place alongside other recent personal non-fiction from Irish women such as Emilie Pine and Doireann Ní Ghríofa. However, Kinsella carves out her own space within this recent niche, writing frankly and thoughtfully about what it is to be a new mother in Ireland right now: post mother and baby homes, post the eighth amendment, and concerned with how the pressures of social media and the anxiety about climate change impact new parents.


Kinsella’s writing deftly draws the reader into the murky waters of time in new motherhood. This book could be described as memoir, essay, or non-fiction—but more important than the genres it defies, it is the story of a new mother and baby, told in non-chronological vignettes or fragments over the span of eighteen months: from conception, through to birth, to when the baby is nine months old, titled with the months before or after birth.

Time and structure are let loose from meaning in this new life for the woman and her baby, and that freedom makes for a very unique reading experience.

At the end of the book’s timeframe the speaker explains that she can no longer write about this son in this way, because they have ceased to be the one unit together, “motherandbaby” or “motherbaby.”

Jumping back and forth in time, the passages are disjointed and at first seem vague, mimicking the confusion and sleeplessness the mother feels. In many cases, the format takes the shape of a thought followed by bullet points developing this same theme.
We know that the writer (who may be, or may just resemble, Kinsella) is finding it difficult to work, and write poetry, and this repeated formula feels true to someone trying to find their way back to writing through journaling and drafting.

She calls the mother the keeper of memory and family history, which is something that is passed through the female line, unlike a father’s second name.

The speaker wants to record for herself, as she doesn’t trust her own memory, but also in defiance of older parents who romanticise this fraught, stressful time now that time has passed, referring fondly to “hope in the struggle.” Even more so, she wants her son to grow up and “know [we] loved our days with him so much, we wanted to live them twice.”

The book is subtitled “On Motherhood and Madness”, and indeed a significant amount of time is devoted to mental illness and the difficulties of getting help with this in Ireland, especially once coupled with how people feel they are not listened to while pregnant or have a new child.

However, by the end of the book the madness part of the subtitle felt unsuited, perhaps because I felt I had become assimilated to this new way of language and lived this experience alongside Kinsella.

I also genuinely felt that the extremes of emotion, the anxiety and the dark preoccupations and intrusive thoughts were an understandable and almost sensible reaction to such a huge life event, and it helped me understand a little of this experience.

This book doesn’t read like a chronicle of madness—but a beacon for new parents who feel they are completely alone.

What does it mean to give birth and be a mother how does it change you and your relationship with the world around you. This book is about modern mother's in Ireland but thinks back to historical representations of mother's, birth and conception.
I found it very easy to relate to and interesting to hear a voice I hadn't heard before. The Irish mother can be used as a cliche and this puts a new modern spin on that.

A raw description on the life-altering step of becoming a mother, the power of women, and the failings of society experienced by women. Alice Kinsella's debut is a powerful read I had to step away from it for a number of weeks as a lot of the writing resonated with my own experiences. The style of writing takes a bit of adjustment to get used to but the scattergun style captures so beautifully the mind of a new mother. The timeline changes from chapter to chapter described in terms of +/- months of the birth of her child and captures the impact it has on most of all her mind sometimes beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking. Kinsella also portrays the barriers to women in society with a focus on her journey to become a mother.
Fans of Doireann ni Ghriofa's "A Ghost in the throat" will find much to love in this. A wonderful debut.

Kinsella's debut prose novel is a slippery one to categorise, not just in content, but in form. As she states at the beginning "everything in this book is refutable... I don't call this book fiction, as I at no point intentionally made anything up, but I would not be bold enough to claim it as fact, either". She makes no bones about what the reader is getting here; this is not going to be a straightforward memoir about motherhood. It’s a memoir of sorts, concerned with the author’s first pregnancy and her son’s first months of life. It flits from thought to thought, time to time, narrative slipping away from the reader as it did from the new mother. The result is a compelling and powerful read as well as a deeply personal one.

Kinsella is also a poet, and her mastery of language is on display here. Milk plays with form , italics and brackets slip-sliding around the page. But to the author’s credit, it never feels overdone or pretentious, merely adding to the sense of an anxious brain narrating this work. It really worked for me, in a way that form-bending works often don’t, and the result is a book that feels like a hurricane.

I was slightly apprehensive about reading this one; I am not a mother, and so I worried I would not connect with it. But the depth and breadth of human experience - and female experience - between this pages meant that I needn't have. As well as new motherhood, Kinsella is pre-occupied with a woman's place in a chang(ing)(ed?) Ireland.

Chapters considering the weight of Ireland's history on pregnancy and birth are stirring, infuriating, and profoundly harrowing. The Magadalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes and recent Repeal referendum are all on Kinsella’s mind as she waits for her son to be born, and her discussion on the push-pull of feeling “ardently pro-choice…[and wanting] to protect this baby, my baby” is so profound to read; she is articulating long-whispered thoughts and conversations, adding them to the page and not turning away. On a related topic, Kinsella writes with clarity and emotion about her own mental health difficulties and the impact they had on her pregnancy and new motherhood. I am far from a mother, but the way she depicts her brain’s (mal?)functions took my breath away.

Milk is a profoundly beautiful, haunting read that I am still thinking about long after I’ve finished it. It's An ode to Motherhood - Kinsella’s own mother takes centre stage in the novel, and her support of new mum and baby is another topic for discussion that fascinated me. Irish women, more and more, rely on mothers to raise their babies; this arrangement, though common, has its own complexities, and as someone who spent a lot of time with their granny pre-school age, it allowed me to consider that relationship - between me, my mum, and my granny - in a whole new light. The best books reach out from the page and show you something new about yourself, and I think Alice Kinsella has nailed that here. Reading Milk was a profound experience for me. Kinsella has captured the fractured terror and boundless love that motherhood brings to a tee, while still creating a world that will be compelling to any reader, mother or no. A stunning book that deserves to be one of the most lauded of 2023.

This is an extraordinary telling of the realities of new motherhood, the anxieties it brings and what will keep you up at night. It is raw and honest, confronting things that some women may not even be able to admit to themselves. This is Kinsella opening her arms to all the mothers out there, saying come here and let’s share our experience, and chances are you’ll find similarities and realise you are not as alone as you first felt.
This really is a great memoir, Kinsella’s writing style is disjointed but reflects her state of mind, flickering from thought to thought. She also explores political issues in Ireland and the impact of these on the lives of women.
I thought this was a brilliant and eye opening read into motherhood, and would recommend to many. Definitely a five star read.

Milk by Alice Kinsella is an insightful memoir about pregnancy, motherhood, mental health difficulties, female experiences.

Beautifully written, as is to be expected from a poet! I'ts very interesting to see this generation of young mothers establish themselves and their lives in print and is a worthy addition to the genre

Milk highlights the numerous failings of systems which should be there to protect women, but, instead, work against new mothers, leaving them feeling trapped and anxious at a time when there should be the maximum support available.

The structure of Alice Kinsella's work reflects how a new mother's mind jumps here and there, unable to focus on one thing in particular. Sleep deprivation alone can do this, but once you add in the responsibility of caring and feeding a young baby, it's no surprise that more than a bullet point of information can seem overwhelming.

I really enjoyed this account of the author's experience, and whilst I fully agree with the animal rights issues surrounding dairy milk, I felt that part of the book was shoe-horned in, rather than being a natural addition. But, on the whole, I would highly recommend this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book.

In this powerful book, the author recounts her experiences as a woman and a new mother while peering back into her past as well as that of the older women in her family and in Ireland. She has long suffered from serious depression and anxiety, which was exacerbated by both the trauma of giving birth and of new motherhood, both of which she is unprepared for. She has an unexpected caesarean without adequate pain relief as the doctor dismissed her statements that she was in excruciating pain, insisting that she could not actually feel anything. Once she was at home with the new baby, her anxiety went through the roof, preventing her from sleep and normal functioning. She also lost part of her identity when she could not focus on the words that have sustained her as a reader, writer, poet.

The book is written in short staccato sentences that jump rapidly from one thought to another. This style heightens the readers understanding of how she feels--there are no long meditative passages here.

In the author's note at the beginning, she states,' I don't call this book fiction, as I at no point intentionally made anything up, but I wouldn't be bold enough to call it fact either. It is what it is, the at times chaotic musings of a woman trying to write her way out of madness..'

That sums it up well. when I was in grad school a few decades ago, I did research on the ideology of motherhood among white suburban US women. Although Alice Kinsella is Irish, and is much younger than the women I interviewed, the issues were the same. Perhaps one day things will change. this book is well worth reading.