A New Mother’s Descent Into Madness

I can’t imagine. I say these words, out loud, nearly every time I speak with a new mother.

As a dad, I have a daughter who I did not carry for nine months, who I nurtured but did not nurse. I worried over her as a newborn, but it was usually an ambient worry and not one consuming every single cell in my body.

Experiencing joy untold from this baby, a joy whose intensity borders on the celestial? I can’t imagine. Struggling to balance everything and sometimes losing your sense of self around this newborn? I can’t imagine.

After reading Bloodfire, Baby, a harrowing and realistic story of a new mother besieged by a postpartum depression exacerbated by a silent trauma from her Caribbean ancestry, I can say that I can at least start to imagine. That’s because, across the novel’s 304 pages, author Eirinie Carson writes with razor-sharp emotional detail and frighteningly authentic inner monologue.

In Bloodfire, Baby, Sofia is a new mother whose Blackness is never too far from her mind — or those of her white neighbors in her wealthy enclave of the North Bay. She has escaped her own mother’s Jehovah’s Witness zealotry, found love in New York with an earnest and well-intentioned young white man, Emil, and dove headfirst into a Bay Area life of wedded and maternal bliss.

Except, as any mother can tell you, it’s not all bliss. Even before Emil, an assistant film director, leaves for a three-week shoot, Sofia is filled with worry and distrust. After he’s gone, Sofia eyes even her closest friend with suspicion, begins to venomously detest her condescending mother-in-law, and descends slowly into psychosis — alone, unkempt and unsure of her surroundings.

Her estranged mother keeps calling. Sofia keeps ignoring the calls. And the shadowy figures that loom in the periphery of the house don’t help.

The real-life source of Carson’s stunning descriptions of motherhood may not be hard to pinpoint; Carson wrote the book shortly after giving birth to her firstborn. Like Sofia, Carson is also the eldest daughter in a long lineage of eldest daughters, lives as a Black mother in a North Bay city whose Black population is almost nonexistent, and has a husband whose work takes him out of town for weeks or months at a time.

Beyond that, I won’t guess how much of the book is autobiographical. What I can tell you is that it feels very alive and real, just as much as Carson’s previous work, The Dead Are Gods — an engrossing, award-winning memoir about a chaotic-in-the-best-way friend who copilots Carson in and around the London club scene of the 2000s, and of the consuming grief after her unexpected death.

One more thing: do not miss the book’s final climax. If, like me, you read it while dizzy and delirious on a few hours’ sleep, it hits even harder. (Upon finishing the final sentence, I literally laughed out loud.)

I expect Bloodfire, Baby to be marketed to mothers, as catharsis, as a book that skillfully puts into words what most new mothers don’t have the language for. But it should be prescribed to new fathers, too. As hard as rearing a newborn was for me — my wife and I worked opposite shifts, each of us alone with the baby for 8 hours — I knew it had to be harder for her.

With compelling precision, Bloodfire, Baby makes me feel even more certain of it.

‘Bloodfire, Baby’ is out now through Dutton. Eirinie Carson appears at several book readings in the Bay Area, including Feb. 17 at Marcus Books in Oakland, Feb. 20 at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma, and Feb. 24 at the Writer’s Grotto in San Francisco. Details on events here.