Milk: An Extract

on revisiting, some preamble, an extract

The cycle of book writing has peaks and troughs of public life vs hiding away. I’d always known this, but I didn’t realise how often these overlap between books.

When I was writing Milk, I was doing the publicity for a book I’d edited called Empty House , all I wanted to talk about was motherhood. Then, during the book tour for Milk I was researching Wake of the Whale and kept accidentally bringing humpbacks into conversations about breastfeeding. Perhaps I’m just contrary, or chronically the bold girl in class doing what I’m not supposed to, now that I’m supposed to be talking about whales, all I want to do is revisit motherhood. Perhaps it’s not contrariness, but where I am in my own life. My child is in school now. It has been five years since I started writing Milk, and it has been in the world for twenty months. I’ve done many events, received beautiful emails, and written and published another book. So much has changed, and yet so little has changed, I’m still grappling with qu…