Motherhood Is a Weird, Wild Trip. Dive In!

The Mother: A Graphic Memoir
Rachel Deutsch
Douglas & McIntyre (2025)

New Yorker cartoonist Rachel Deutsch has a new baby. This one’s a book — her debut graphic memoir. It’s about giving birth to her first baby, and it’s called The Mother: A Graphic Memoir. It’s excellent.

Released in March by Douglas & McIntyre, The Mother is an unvarnished, candid retelling of Deutsch’s journey from her life as a single woman who wants a baby to the birth of her child and the author’s rebirth as a parent. It’s a painful transformation; in a kind of purgatory, the old self is burned away. The line between human and animal fades, like the line between mother and child, night and day. It’s an unflinching portrayal of early parenthood: a beautiful dream and a nightmare, but somehow you’re never asleep.

Deutsch’s writing is excellent, as you’d expect from an author whose short fiction garnered a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2023. But it’s the art that makes The Mother really work. Just as they always are, whenever they’ve appeared in McSweeney’s or, yes, the New Yorker, her illustrations are hilarious, infused with pathos, totally surreal and yet completely true to life.

“I found becoming a mother to be very creatively inspiring,” Deutsch told The Tyee from her home in Montreal. “It was a massive transformation for myself in terms of identity, in terms of creative material.”

While waiting for her big box of books to arrive from the publisher, a milestone delivery for a new author, Deutsch took a moment to speak with us about motherhood, memoir and being a mammal.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: I feel like The Mother really captures the difference between having a baby and becoming a mother. Those experiences are obviously connected, but they're also different experiences, different stories. At the start, we meet pre-baby Rachel, who has always wanted a baby. But later on, you find yourself mourning that woman. I think for a lot of people there's this sense that the woman who gets what she wanted will still be the woman who wanted it. In The Mother, we see that it isn’t.

Rachel Deutsch: I'm also a social worker, that's my kind of career job, and we talk a lot about this theory of parts; we have different parts. We have our child at certain ages part, we have our baby part, we have us through different points of our own development. Becoming a mom hit all of that. All of those parts were affected and reacting in different ways, through grief or fear. Parts of me were very afraid, and sad, and then excited and joyful.

Early on, a nurse tells you: “motherhood is pain.” And the reader is left thinking, what a mean lady. Be more uplifting. It's funny, too, because it comes after labour, when the pain is supposedly over. But by the end of the book, I thought, maybe the nurse undersold it. Motherhood is death. Or at least the death of a certain self, and a kind of rebirth. In another interview, you called it matrescence. What is that?

It’s a developmental shift that comes when you become a mother, and it’s similar to puberty — an actual life transition. And actually, they have found that it happens with non-birthing partners too: it could be men, or women who don't carry a baby, same-sex couples, that kind of thing.

But through this intense experience of care and creation of new life, your brain actually changes, your hormones change, what you notice, what you pay attention to, is different. I really, really felt that so strongly.

I feel like one of the issues that men have with this phase is that it doesn't happen inside of our bodies. So it’s not as immediately felt, and fathers kind of need to consciously accept that it’s happening. You’ve got that line where [your partner] says, “I just want to play video games and be alone.” I remember that.

There’s a part of the book where I was, like, “Acknowledge me. This big thing I just did, just see it.” But I think it is a massive change for anyone involved. I guess it would be nice to have more space to talk about becoming a parent in general, for any gender.

I feel like men should have to go to a support group about it or something, because you really shouldn’t complain to your partner — she’s getting it worse. At one point, Mark says, “I hurt too!” And I remember that feeling: “Notice me as well!” But our job [as men] in that moment, I think, is to empathize with you [the mother]. How does Mark feel about being presented this way?

He's been supportive and very open. He’s French, from France, and they have more of a culture of cartooning there. So he got it. Like, yes, this is what happened, go ahead, it’s your story.

I love a memoir that’s so honest, the readers wonder if your friends and family are upset with you. It’s the only way to fly, but I know that it’s always a little risky.

I really love memoir for this. I’m more familiar with graphic memoir, and it’s vulnerable and raw. And I think maybe part of it is that I’m so visual, so when I see an illustration of something, and if there’s no words, you can get at certain things, maybe in an easier way than with writing.

Maybe for excellent writers, it’s easy to do that as well. But I found, you know, showing some of the loneliness, the expansiveness, like holding the baby and then in the starry room where everything disappears. Or the animals getting involved. I don’t know what the reader got from that, but for me, it was showing this emotional subtext.

Your dreams of being half-woman, half-animal — I remember my partner complaining about that. “I feel like a mammal right now.” I suppose we all are, but most of the time people feel like a person.

Yes. A mammal in all the senses. And not always in a bad way. Like, I was kind of into it too. That was part of, I think, the creative energy. But the breastfeeding, the boobs wandering off, it inspired me. I don't think this exact scene got in the book, but I was just breastfeeding everywhere in public. And sometimes I would just, like, have a boob out, even out of the top of my shirt.

Oh it’s in there. I wrote it down. “Your giant milky boob is still out.”

What was I thinking? But I would just stick it over the shirt if I needed to, not caring at all. Not even being in the same world to care, like other people.

That's the funny thing about breastfeeding discourse. People who aren’t currently breastfeeding will be like, “Oh my God, ah, put that away.” But when you're being a mammal, it’s like, “What the fuck are you talking about? I’m gonna breastfeed wherever I need to. My kid’s hungry now.”

I remember, I’d occasionally make eye contact with teenagers or young men walking by and they were like… but I remember just being like, this is my body.

Writing a memoir is basically having a boob out. This is my body. And these are my innermost thoughts. I think it’s especially hard to write honestly about our own parents. You did that a bit in The Mother, with the bee sting. One thinks what you’d remember is the pain, and instead, it’s just the closeness and attention. That really spoke to me.

I’m sure you experienced this writing too, just kind of thinking of the “show, don't tell” kind of thing, and thinking of these moments as key. That was a scene I added later in the process. When did I feel love and close? That was a moment. I'll put that in and not explain it too much.

It said a lot about your relationship with your mom. When anybody tells a story about their relationship with their mom, there’s what they show you, and then there’s what’s shown, maybe inadvertently, by sharing any story about your parents. In that one, you get a sense that she was a loving mom, but also there was a distance and there was a coldness, and it went away that day for just a second. Having a kid really makes you revisit those moments. You kind of become your baby, so you're young again, and everything takes on a different light. There’s this kind of collapsing of time that occurs.

It was wild in that way. It was like a drug trip.

It really is!

I'm sure you also experienced re-parenting yourself. Here’s what I wish had happened to me. And giving your kid a hug and realizing, oh, this is what I wanted.

At some point you have your own kid, and think, okay, I’m not gonna fix the old me. Let’s just try to do a better job with this one.

Yes, I need to. I need to.

The Mother also does just a wonderful job of demonstrating the sheer hell of having young kids. There were moments where I thought, “Oh wow, this really captures it!” And moments where I thought, “Oh God, this really captures it.” Especially the nighttime wake-ups. I can't think of anything I’ve enjoyed less than waking up at odd hours just to be rejected by a baby, and then disappoint my partner, like, sorry, it's gotta be you. He wants breast milk and the feeling of his first home. I tried. I even told him to be quiet. He would not listen. Was it uncomfortable for you to revisit those moments at all?

Not so much, when it was still the story I was telling. But re-reading it, yeah, those moments were awful. I don't even know if I did it justice, how bad it was in the middle of the night. It’s torture.

You also captured that particular despair of not having any free child care nearby — of not having family around to bail you out. I know that feeling well. When it's just you guys, thinking, when do we get a break? And the answer is never.

Never. When they’re older. People will say when they’re five. But I can’t even wait till tomorrow.

Canada has produced some incredible graphic memoirists. Chester Brown, Kate Beaton. Are you conscious of this canon you’re contributing to? Any significant influences?

Theresa Wong is another graphic memoirist in Canada, and she wrote a book about postpartum depression. When I was in the middle of writing this, I talked with her and she was so helpful, because I was like, your story has a point of view. You had postpartum depression. It makes sense. But mine is nothing. And she was so encouraging. Like, no, this is a story. Becoming a mother is a story.

It's funny to have that anxiety. Because, yeah, it’s a huge story. It happens to so many people, and somehow it feels under-told.

I had that reaction from agents that I approached as well. We like it, but this is not a universal story.

Yes it is!

It’s so universal. But in the end, it’s called The Mother and, like, it’s so woman. But also, it’s a story of life change, and in that sense, it’s really relatable.

Plus there’s a man in it. So what’s to complain about? There’s a man right there!

I should have put him, like, in front of me.

It should be called The Mother, Plus a Man.

Or The Man (Mother).

I suppose it’s partly because we don’t want to acknowledge how difficult this stage of life can be for women, or we’d have to do more to help. I’m reminded of that line that feels like a real thesis for The Mother: “Saying things that really hurt, don't hurt, seems to be a theme of pregnancy. Or maybe just being a woman.”

I’ve been told so many times in life when I’m in pain that I’m not.