Is There Anything More Terrifying Than Motherhood?
Author Leah Konen discusses her personal experience of becoming a parent and explores our obsession with thrillers and horror about being motherhood.
I don’t think I knew true fear until I had a newborn child.
I may have been a horror movie fan since I was old enough to watch them in secret so my parents didn’t know, may have cut my reading teeth on R.L. Stein and Christopher Pike, and may spend most of my adult life either reading or writing thrillers, but the sentiment still rings true: Nothing really truly terrified me until I had a baby.
There’s a reason why I set my latest thriller, You Should Have Told Me, against the backdrop of new motherhood. The book follows Janie, who’s struggling to adapt to life with a six-week-old infant. Her baby won’t sleep, she’s not feeling any of the “right” feelings, and a secret she’s keeping from her partner, Max, threatens to tear her new family apart. So, when warm, doting Max helpfully offers to do all the feedings for the night so Janie can catch up on some sleep, she jumps at the chance. But at 3 a.m., she wakes to the sound of her daughter screaming. She finds her alone in her crib, diaper unchanged, fussing and writhing—Max is gone.
As Janie cares for her daughter alone and tries desperately to uncover the secrets of Max’s disappearance, a terrifying new development shakes her world even further: A woman in town has been murdered, and the police think Max may have had something to do with it. While I luckily never had a partner go missing on me or get wrapped up in a murder investigation, my own daughter burst onto the scene a few months before a global pandemic, after a traumatic emergency birth that left me and my husband in a state of shock.
In the early days and weeks, I struggled to adapt to no sleep and near-constant breastfeeding, wanting to experience all the right feelings but with a sense that they’d never come. I wrote the first 75 pages of the book a few months later, when my daughter had finally gotten into a good nap routine and when I had a chance to look back on all that happened and appreciate it for the horror-show that those early days can be.
Of course, it starts even before birth, beginning with pregnancy, nine months of a real-life body horror—something that’s been chronicled or allegorized in horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Alien, and revived in contemporary bookish explorations of the topic, like Anne Heltzel’s Just Like Mother, a brilliant exploration of the pressures we put on women to bear children, and the forthcoming Delicate Condition, a supernatural body horror with a cultish twist that chronicles how the medical establishment fails women (especially pregnant ones).
Sure, pregnancy IRL has some moments of magic (hearing a heartbeat, feeling a first kick), but there’s still something so distinctly scary about knowing your body isn’t entirely your own, so strange about growing a living creature in a place that, from your own birth, has always belonged only to you. Add in morning sickness, exhaustion, and complications, and your day-to-day can become almost nightmarish.
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And once the baby comes, the fears continue. Are they eating enough? Sleeping enough? Could they choke on something in the three seconds you take to run to the bathroom, suddenly stop breathing in the middle of the night? And as they grow into toddlers, are they meeting their milestones, fully enriched, learning everything they need to learn to get by in this wild world?
It’s no wonder books like Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House, Ashley Audrain’s The Push, and the hilarious yet horrifying Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder tackle so expertly the difficulties of baby- and toddlerhood, especially from the perspective of mothers who are struggling to connect with a role society has told them should be instinctive and biological, if not beatific.
Of course, the horrors don’t stop there. Films like The Babadook, Hereditary, Goodnight Mommy, and We Need to Talk About Kevin take on the horrors that follows mothers as their children grow and get ready to go out into the world, always with the awareness that if a child or teen does something wrong, the world will place blame almost instantly at a mother’s feet.
The reality is, until we give mothers more support, from pregnancy through birth, infanthood, toddlerhood, and later years, and until we stop shaming and blaming mothers for their every decision and for every action of their children, we’re likely to see many, many more thrillers like You Should Have Told Me tackling these topics in the future.
Leah Konen is the author of You Should Have Told Me, as well as two previous thrillers, The Perfect Escape and All The Broken People, which have been featured in the New York Post, Marie Claire, She Reads, and the Charlotte Observer, among other publications. She is also the author of five YA novels, and her books have been translated into nearly a dozen languages and optioned for film and TV. She lives in Brooklyn and Saugerties, NY, with her husband, their daughter, Eleanor, and their dog, Farley.
