Book Review: Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel
A 360 on Motherhood - The struggle starts just by having an ovary, or not.
I’m 41 and a mother to two boys. My childhood friend -also 41, and not a mother- recommended Still Born. She heard about it through Dua Lipa’s book club. Even though we share a deep friendship and a lot of thoughts around this topic, I realised: we’ve never actually talked about it. Not really.
Maybe we don’t dare. Maybe we’re afraid of hurting each other, invalidating one another’s choices, or destabilising lives that are already hard enough to show up for every day; regardless of whether we became mothers or not.
So, I took her recommendation as a silent invitation for conversation. And I dove in.
Spoiler
Still Born follows two close friends: one, a woman who chose early in life not to become a mother (she had her tubes tied in her twenties), and the other, a woman who learns her baby will be born with a fatal disease, only to die right after birth. The doctors have already issued a death certificate for the child; literally and metaphorically.
What Worked for Me
I think the book is great to openly tackle issues that even a 35-year-old friendship sometimes can’t. One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its insistence that childless women are not heartless women. I deeply welcome and support this perspective.
The suspense around whether little Inés would live or die hooked me completely. I listened to it while driving 600 kilometers from Paris to the Beaujolais, and later during a day trip to Lake Annecy with my sons. I finished it in one stretch.
The couple’s very factually documented story is layered with the narrator’s nuanced sociological and personal insights, as well as interwoven backstories: her own complex relationship with her mother; a neighbour utterly drained by motherhood; the neighbour’s young son, whom she unexpectedly finds herself caring for; and even a pigeon giving birth on her balcony.
Together, these threads form a kind of 360° lens on motherhood—with anecdotes drawn from both the human and animal kingdoms.
Where It Lost Me (Just a Bit)
And yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the storytelling was a bit too hygienic—too curated. The narrative felt as if it followed a checklist: Inés mother jealous over the nanny, the neighbour’s boy in need of unexpected care, the pigeon giving birth, even a little hint of sexual tension between the author and her neighbour... all the ingredients were there, and all appeared right on the right place at the right time - for my taste and my taste only surely.
While the emotional terrain was rich, and there was certainly a lot to feel around this story as a female reader, the delivery sometimes felt more like a beautifully written thesis than a messy, raw journey. I found myself skipping some of the fictionalised subplots in favour of the suspenseful core story about the couple and their baby; that part gripped me completely. But that gripping narrative, I felt, came at the expense of the novel’s overall storytelling depth, especially in the fictional threads that felt more constructed than lived.
To conclude, Still Born is a book I’m grateful to have read. I truly appreciated witnessing the lives of two women -smart, complex, and resilient friends- each shaped in different ways by one simple fact: being a mother, or not. Let’s face it : the struggle begins for all of us simply by having an ovary, or not.