The last day of maternity leave, and an unnamed mother of two decides to stage a “yes day”, full of treats and good feelings. Of course it does not go according to plan: the treats are deficient, misjudged and underappreciated; the good feelings are fleeting, quickly upstaged by anxiety, guilt or humiliation. This familiar-sounding scenario is the simple yet bracing premise of Lisa Owens’s second novel, following her impressive first comic fiction of female-centred modernity, 2016’s Not Working.

The academic E Ann Kaplan once wrote that “motherhood is the major emotional experience of my adult life” – certainly a relatable observation, and reason enough why some writers may swerve going through the experience altogether. But when using it as narrative material, the aim is to render the cluttered yet lonely planet of motherhood in some new way, drawing on the energies of honesty and idiosyncrasy to frame a common, universal adventure as something singular and memorable.

The day begins at 5am, when Felix is woken by his baby brother Rudy, sending the “Three Musketeers” – mother and her two boys – down to the kitchen for a “special” breakfast. The father and husband, also unnamed, is away at a health-tech conference in Barcelona, and remains a shadowy, loaded presence throughout the novel, the focus of various “differently shaped parcels of resentment” including suspicions of adultery and gaslighting, depending on his wife’s experience at any given moment. To wider society – doctors, cashiers – she does have a name: “Mum”, which is how she is referred to during a sticky moment in a shop where Felix has a violent tantrum, and later during the medical emergency which takes over the second half of the book. This blanketing, anonymous term of address is an example of the achingly exact realism Owens achieves in her account, in which a woman’s identity is usurped by the immediate existential requirements of her children; she becomes “a flat, rudimentary approximation of a person, lacking in nuance or finesse”.

It’s the people closely surrounding “Mum” who embody the bold colours and textures of the novel’s precision. Her retired parents are deftly drawn, at once playful and commanding in a crisis, while the children themselves are full of life and entertainment, springing off the page in their convincing rambunctiousness, and also in how much they are loved. The cruel moments of maternal battering, such as “Felix’s bike pedal brutalising her shins every few metres” as she is pushing the buggy in the rain, sit movingly alongside lasting observational description: the little boy’s equal capacity for rage and forgiveness, “a marshmallow of love in his puffy winter coat”. It’s not easy to get children right in novels, but when it is done well they become a winning literary charm.

As we follow the Three Musketeers through the trials of their day, there are occasions where the minutiae of parenthood become perhaps too precise, too involved, and we are taken too thoroughly into logistics, such as the details of acquiring baby paraphernalia from Gumtree and the exact contents of a fridge. This gives Natural Disaster a slightly plodding effect, but it is also, it could be argued, a feature of its realism: the slowing of time that motherhood can bring about, the yawning length of a day that can in turn slow one’s thoughts to fixate on the mundane and prosaic while the “active” world rolls on outside. “Her whole being is marbled through with guilt of it all,” Owens writes in anticipation of her character going back to work, “but a significant part of her has been hungering to return”, to escape the regular plummet into “a black hole of dead-eyed apathy”, as a “pinched, warped, hollow being”.

Amid the humour and viscera of marital squabbles, accidental texts, a mysterious tampon and breastfeeding on the toilet, serious issues are addressed about the modern woman’s practical and emotional responses to “having it all”, and whether any real contentment might be found down that path. Is it better to focus on your children until they are of school age, or to work all the way through using nannies and nurseries, possibly producing more confident, resilient offspring? Is it possible to maintain a sense of self throughout the wonders and woes of the maternal rollercoaster, or do we change irrevocably and for ever, becoming merely an outline, waiting to be refilled? These are eternal, ever-repeating questions, and Owens does not attempt to answer them, only to reflect on the heightened particulars of a singular, emotionally myriad experience. Both sobering and celebratory, this novel is a powerful addition to the literature of surviving procreation.

Diana Evans is the author of I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations and A House for Alice.

Oh, to have been born in a small, stylish country with good food and favourable sea breezes. No empire, no holy faith, no condescension, no fatal ideologies. The fish is grilled, the extended family roll in on their scooters, the wine looks amber in its glass as the socially democratic sun begins its plunge into the sparkling waters below.

This was not my fortune. I was born to one dying superpower and am now living in another. I was born to an ideology pasted all over enormous granite buildings in enormous Slavic letters and now live in one where the same happens in bold caps on what was once Twitter and what purports to be Truth (Pravda?) Social. America, Russia. Russia, America. Together they were kind enough to give me the material from which I made a decent living as a writer, but they took away any sense of normality, any faith that societies can provide lives without bold-faced slogans, bald-faced lies, leaders with steely set jaws, and crusades against phantom menaces, whether Venezuelan or Ukrainian.

I have written dystopian fiction before, and my latest novel, Vera, or Faith, is a continuation of the natural outcome of my birth in Leningrad and my removal, at age seven, to Reagan’s America. I think I have predicted the future with fairly good aim in novels such as Super Sad True Love Story, where social media helps to give rise to a fascist America, although my timeline when that book was published in 2010 was 30 years into the future, not a decade and change.

But before I wrote that book, there was a period of some optimism where, I confess, I got things terribly wrong. I imagined, in my least cynical moments, that Russia would become more like America over the years, or at the least more habituated to pluralism and the rule of law. Of course, the very opposite happened. America is becoming Russia with every day. The tractors I would watch on Soviet television leading to ever more heroic harvests are now tariffs that will bring manufacturing back to our land. The dissidents who were the Soviet enemy within are now the vastly fictionalised Tren de Aragua gang members who supposedly terrorise our land, and indeed all migrants deemed insufficiently Afrikaner. Politicians in all countries lie, but the Russian and American floods of lies are not just harbingers of a malevolent ideology, they are the ideology.

Vera, the titular character of my new novel, is a 10-year-old girl growing up in an America that is just slightly different from our own. Her best friend is an artificially intelligent chessboard named Kaspie (after the chess player), the car that drives her to school is an ingratiating AI named Stella, and the lessons of her school are preparing her for a constitutional convention that will allow certain “exceptional” Americans, ie those who can trace their heritage to the colonial era but were not brought to the country in chains, five-thirds of a vote. This is being done, Vera is continually told, not to diminish her rights (she, being half-Korean, would not qualify for the enhanced vote), but to honour the Americans who are exceptional by nature of their birth.

One reason I wanted to write from the point of view of a 10-year-old character – who, as it happens, is also half-Russian by heritage – is because of the way living in an authoritarian regime changed my own life. There was daily cruelty in the courtyards, classrooms and workplaces of the Soviet Union (not to mention the daily fisticuffs over nonexistent products in the food stores), but there was something else you could never forget even as a child: ubiquity. I grew up a stone’s throw from the biggest statue of Lenin in Leningrad; Lenin looked down at me from the walls of the kindergarten classroom in which my mother taught music; and the very city in which I lived had been renamed after him.

When I wrote Vera, my own son was 10, and Trump was every bit as much a part of his life as Lenin was of mine, from talk in the playground to conversations at the dinner table to the discussions of his social studies class. It is unsurprising that Trump’s sometime ideological consigliere Steve Bannon has chosen Leninism as a model for his hero’s rule. All mode of social inquiry, even at a fifth-grade level, must lead back to the scowling man on the television and telephone screen. My parents and I may have different styles of childrearing and certainly different politics, but despite our disagreements I will always honour them for getting me out of the Soviet Union at the right time. The question for my son as well as the fictional Vera remains: is it time to do the same with our children? Or is there still room to stay and fight?

Of course, there are large, some would say crucial differences between the Soviet Union of the 1970s and the Trumpistan that America has become today. Much as the comparisons of the contemporary United States with Hitler’s Germany are incomplete (though getting more complete by the day), Russia and America are hardly twins either. And yet, their increasing similarities raise the question of how the similarities that seemed nonexistent at the end of the cold war are becoming unavoidable now.

To start with, these are vast lands that stretch from sea to sea. Their size alone is enough to fuel messianic complexes, manifest destinies, divine rights. And religion, which can easily morph into ideology and then violence, drives the stupidity of both nations. In both societies, religion helped normalise the bondage of other human beings: slavery in America and the institution of serfdom in Russia. Inequality is baked into the national psyche of both, despite Russia’s experiments with state socialism: the idea that human beings must be parsed into a multitude of categories. Obviously, other countries have caste systems, but none has the capacity to impose its worldview on the rest of the globe with such stubborn resilience. The Soviet Union loudly professed the brotherhood of nations, but Russian racism remained thick and outlandish on the ground (ask almost any African exchange student), and was converted with great ease into a hatred of Ukrainians, with Russian television using animated images of Ukrainians rolling in the mud with pigs and references to a racial slur that can be compared with the worst used in the States.

Trumpistan dives right into this morass with the falsehood that some commonplace tattoos found on Venezuelan bodies supposedly signify gang orientation, but really emphasising that some people – brown or black or non-Christian or non-straight – can never fully claim the mantle of Americanness. There are, indeed, “exceptional” Americans, those that look like Trump and much of his coterie, and then there are those who semi-belong, or who may stay as long as they are useful, and then there are those who don’t belong at all and can be deported at will.

Trump loves Putin with good reason. Putin takes the messianic ideals that are found at the nub of both American and Russian societies and he makes something out of them that Trump can only find beautiful and instrumental to his own power and corrupt dealings.

As both countries enter headlong into postindustrial, likely artificially intelligent ages, Putin subverts the meaninglessness of Russian working-class lives with loud (though sometimes nonsensical and contradictory) narratives, rooted in a perceived insult to the messianic ideals of the fatherland. When, during his debate with the doomed Kamala Harris, Trump said that Haitian immigrants – those who would never be true Americans even if granted citizenship – are “eating the cats … eating the dogs”, he almost surpassed his master in terms of the clarity and shamelessness of his message, as well as an understanding of the audience for whom these comments were intended. It is most interesting to see older Russian-speaking immigrants in America, who fled the authoritarian USSR of their younger days, embrace Trump precisely because of the clarity of his message, their inability to deny a great leader shouting slogans that, if you take away their ideological direction, look much like the ones that lined the walls of our metro stations or the front pages of the newspapers we sometimes used as toilet paper.

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When I wrote Vera, there was one thing I couldn’t quite do to my 10-year-old heroine, which is to subject her to the threat of violence. She was simply too young for that, and also, because her family was financially privileged, less likely to face such a threat. But as I write this, in June 2025, Trump is taking the final steps of authoritarian progression in his attempt to label any protest against the unconstitutional nature of his rule as an insurrection that must be put down with military force. These attempts, as we can see, can be easily accepted by his followers, many of whom drink from the well of (often Russian-born) misinformation. There are parts of our population who are aching to shoot a brown “un-American” person at the border, in the same way many Russians without a purpose in life dream of profitably shooting a Ukrainian.

And whereas Putin has relied on his own praetorian guard, the Rosgvardia (or Russian National Guard), so Trump is stumbling toward his own force in the fiercely racist and loyal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Ice, which, in cities like Los Angeles and elsewhere, happily spreads the fuel with which our democracy may soon burn.

I want to take a step back and return to the mythical country with which I began. My favourite country in the world, Italy, is ruled by a political party with ties to Mussolini. Other countries I love are not paragons of social democracy and have little love of the “outsider”, although they may rely on exactly such people to care for their parents or raise their children. But the danger of America and Russia lies in the ferocity with which we believe, a ferocity that in Russia is fuelled by a justifiable anger (and built-in fatalism), given how the population has been ruled throughout the entirety of Russian history, and in America is enhanced by a population that, despite its relative wealth, reads below a sixth-grade level and is easily susceptible to manipulation. Ignorance, to add a pinch of Orwell to the proceedings, is the strength of both regimes. Convincing these populations that slavery was but a feeble blip on the radar of American history or that Ukrainians are porcine savages who precipitated Russia’s invasion requires a groundwork set by centuries of hatred and exploitation.

So where should my Vera live? It is hard to say, because living under these regimes is already preparing our children for the two choices they will inevitably face – to fight or to conform. And is it right to ask a child to give up her birthright, the right to live in a country that invented the grace of the blues, the easy slide of denim jeans, the sweet, almost religious voices of Walt Whitman and James Baldwin? That is a lot to ask of a 10-year-old.

The beauty of writing about a child is that you can see the monstrosity of the world adults have built filter through their innocence. But no child stays innocent for ever.

Shakespeare did not leave his wife Anne in Stratford, letter fragment suggests

Apr 23 2025

It has long been assumed that William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was less than happy. He moved to London to pursue his theatrical career, leaving her in Stratford-upon-Avon and stipulating in his will that she would receive his “second best bed”, although still a valued item.

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On 24 June 1965 a young woman sat her eight-month-old baby girl on a blanket in the gardens of the Villa Borghese in Rome, and walked quickly away. Within minutes, a passerby spotted the tiny child, alone, with no identifying documents, no note, not even a name. When the mother did not return to claim her that evening, the baby was handed over to the nuns at Rome’s adoption services. Three days later, the mother’s body was found floating in the Tiber.

Before she died, the woman had sent a letter to the press, containing a brief account of the terrible choice she had made. The letter, handwritten, gave the baby’s name and date of birth, and concluded: “Finding myself in a desperate situation, I have no other choice than to leave my daughter to the compassion of all, And I with my friend will pay with our lives for what we did, or, got right or, got wrong.” The letter was signed “Lucia Galante, now Greco”. Her “friend” was presumed to be the baby’s father, whose body surfaced in the river a week later.

For a long time these scant, heartbreaking, details were all Maria Grazia Calandrone knew of her birth mother. She resisted finding out more. “Growing up, I knew nothing about her, I didn’t want to know anything, she was an image of – I don’t know … not of love … an idea. Of a different life.”

Calandrone, now nearly 60, is speaking to me over Zoom from her house in Rome. Her narrow face is framed by untamable curly black hair and expressive eyebrows. “When I started this journey, it was to discover who she was. Obviously I had no memory of her. Then, when I understood that hers was a story of great and undeserved suffering, I wanted to write about her. Her, and all the other women who have suffered the same injustice.”

The extraordinary book that resulted from this journey, Your Little Matter, was published in Italy in 2022, and has now been translated into English. The book spent weeks on the Italian bestseller lists and was shortlisted for the country’s top literary prize, the Strega. Just as Elena Ferrante’s Naples Quartet revealed the harsh reality of life for young women in Italy’s poorer regions, Calandrone’s memoir gives an unsparing view of the brutal treatment of women in desperate times that resonated powerfully with readers.

“When the book came out, a year and a half ago,” she says, “I was overwhelmed with testimonials from women who told me about the unhappy women in their families.”

Calandrone was adopted by the director of the Italian Communist party and his wife, a teacher. As she grew up, her adoptive mother, who was a complex personality, jealous and demanding, became increasingly exasperated as her daughter – with her dark, curly hair, her strong will, her uncontainable character – turned out to be nothing like her. Partly for fear of incurring her further displeasure, Calandrone buried the story of her birth parents deep.

She became a teacher, a mother of two, a multi-award-winning poet. In 2021, she wrote a lyrical, passionate memoir of her relationship with her adoptive mother – perhaps from a desire to appease her, to express her gratitude. It was her adoptive mother who had, after all, introduced her to literature, given her “the gift of poetry”. When she went on a popular daytime TV chat show to promote the book, it turned out that people who had known her birth mother were watching.

“Two of her friends got in touch,” says Calandrone. “They said they wanted to tell me about her. I had never had the desire … Until then, I had instinctively avoided … But at that point I couldn’t pretend any more.”

Calandrone gives workshops in schools and prisons. She is a believer in the redemptive power of poetry. One of her volumes tells the stories of missing persons. Others, of Hiroshima, 9/11, Babi Yar. Now her own origin story, charged with the power and pathos of a Greek tragedy, finally demanded her full attention. She set off with her teenage daughter Anna to visit her birth mother’s family home in Molise, then a remote and very poor part of south-eastern Italy. “We set out on a trip to find out about our relative, that’s all. But the things people told us about her created a picture of an injustice so huge and so relevant today that I had to write about it.”

To trace the story of Lucia, she plunged into the misery of postwar rural Italy, searching the archives, and the memories of those who knew her. Lucia was born in 1936, when Mussolini was already in power, and the south of Italy was cut off and abandoned, its people suffering in sickness and hunger. Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli is one of the few books to portray the hardship of ordinary lives at the time, but Calandrone also cites film-makers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini.

The poet turned detective to examine the evidence of her lost mother’s early life. There were school photos up to the age of 12: Lucia, a bright, wilful child, was allowed to go to school if her farm work was done. There were girlish confidences: Lucia’s friends recalled her early, wordless romance with Tonino, a boy in the village, forbidden by her father because the boy had no prospects.

“It was the times,” Calandrone says. Her voice is low and she talks rapidly. “After the war, the village was in ruins. They’ve got nothing but this pervasive sense of moral judgment. Of honour. There’s the economic question too, because in the end, what matters if you are that poor is survival. No one cares if you’re in love. What matters is that you guarantee the survival of your future children. And in some parts of the country, nothing has changed.”

Calandrone hungrily examined the few photographs she tracked down of her mother, searching her face and posture for signs of character. She was excited to find Lucia had dark curly hair, like her own. She discovered that her mother was forced to marry against her will, in a match that brought the family security in the form of property. The wedding photo shows her “all in white and she is not smiling”. She has a split lip.

Your Little Matter is a labour of love, a work of resurrection through language. In the opening lines, Calandrone declares: “I am writing this book to tear my mother’s smell from the earth. I am exploring a method for those who have lost their origins, a mathematical system of feeling and thought – so complete as to revive a body, as hot as the earth in summer and as firm.”

Walking around her mother’s loveless home, she lets the furniture tell its story: Lucia moved in with her parents-in-law, their beds divided only by “a cotton curtain, white as a shroud, hanging from the roof beam”. The mattress was filled with dried maize leaves. In the morning, the newlyweds’ bodies, turned away from each other, left a ridge down the middle.

The village had no running water, and the land was farmed by hand. These were the years of the Italian economic boom, but progress was going on elsewhere, in the cities of the north. The church still had an iron grip; what rural Italy lacked in comfort, it more than made up for in hardline moral propriety. Everyone knew Lucia was battered and starved by her in-laws and her husband. Divorce was illegal and deserting the marital home carried a prison sentence.

And then, Lucia fell in love. Giuseppe was a builder, a worldly man, much older than her, already married with children, recently returned from fighting in Mussolini’s disastrous campaign in Eritrea. A skilled engineer dispatched from the world of progress to build a water tower for the village, he charmed the locals as much as he impressed them with his work. Doing repairs on a house for Lucia and her husband, Giuseppe charmed her, too, and Calandrone glimpses her transformation into a woman who laughs and dreams of a different life. This dangerous change is observed with pitiless judgment by the village, and so begins the “social violence” that will lead to Lucia’s death.

There is a sharp sense of shame in the treatment of women in the years before divorce became legal, that has not altogether gone away. Not everyone in the village was pleased to see Lucia’s long-lost daughter, now a celebrated poet; they thought Calandrone had come to drag the village’s reputation through the mud. Someone smashed her car window.

Lucia and Giuseppe defied their families and the gossips, and set up home together. “She broke the law,” Calandrone tells me. “She broke the moral and spiritual rules she had been raised to respect – and that she believed in. She was dragged by a force stronger than herself, by an unimaginable courage, that was love.”

The story became a public scandal. Giuseppe had a disabled son who was dangerously unwell. His wife wrote to the press to denounce his desertion, saying he had been bewitched. Lucia’s husband pressed charges for adultery, a criminal offence. Lucia and Giuseppe were now not only publicly disgraced, but wanted by the police. But there was no going back. Lucia discovered she was pregnant. Like many thousands of desperately poor migrants from southern Italy who moved to the promised land of Milan during the 1950s and 60s, they decided to head for the city and try to create a life for themselves.

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The register of the narrative shifts at this point from a poetic reimagining of the landscape of Lucia’s childhood, to a journalistic reconstruction of the couple’s desperate adventure. Calandrone and her daughter drove to Milan and walked the length of Viale Monza to the northern outskirts of the city where migrants settled as they searched for work. “Those who didn’t manage to get a foothold lived here in terrible conditions … in the mud, and the rats, no running water, no electricity,” she tells me.

“I think this is something Italians are a bit ashamed of,” she says. “When I did an interview in la Stampa [newspaper], and I said that we, coming to Turin and Milan 50 years ago, were the same as the migrants arriving today, who come here looking for a better life, I was verbally abused. There were people who said, ‘No, we came to work, whereas they come to steal’ – the usual rubbish people say. People who don’t believe everyone has the same right as we do, to dream of a better life.”

By the time Giuseppe and Lucia reached Milan, the economic boom was over, and building sites were closing. Now they were fugitives, finding legal work was impossible. Six months pregnant, she was working as a cleaner. The lovers’ situation became desperate. He was in debt – it’s possible he had borrowed a sum he couldn’t repay, to secure them a place to live. Calandrone, on their trail, made numerous requests for the scraps of information contained in the public records of destitute migrants. She discovered that when a baby was born to a mother who had deserted her husband, social services were poised to take the infant into care.

“As soon as I was born I was taken from my mother and given to the nuns,” she tells me. “But after a month and a half she managed to get me back. I don’t know how but she managed to keep me with her, because we were together for a while. I think she managed the impossible. She must have been a tough, courageous woman.”

The final section of the book is a reconstruction of the couple’s desperate attempt, as they run out of road, to make sure their baby will be looked after. Calandrone follows a series of hypotheses and chases down the evidence for each, in what she admits became, for her, an all-consuming pursuit. She describes herself as an obsessive mother, who barely let her children out of her sight when they were small. “My whole life has been predicated on the question: how could a mother leave her baby and then kill herself?”

When Calandrone was 19, she had been given the handbag her mother had left on the riverside before she drowned. The objects it contained now provided precious leads. The plan, as it played out, was meticulous, executed with care. The letter the couple wrote to the leftwing broadsheet l’Unità offered more clues. There were thousands of babies being given up for adoption. Their thinking was, to give their child the best possible chance, they had to create a news story. They would leave her in a public place in Rome and then kill themselves.

The book’s subtitle is My Mother, a News Item. Calandrone takes the press reports of her mother’s death and reconstructs her final hours, follows her into the river, to the morgue, goes through the autopsy report. Nearly 60 years after the event, Calandrone stages a dramatic rescue. Having established the cold facts, she composes an elegy:

“Here is me, looking at you from the future
As you slowly lower yourself into that atomic mirror,
Into that end of the world, and I am looking at you
And I am leaving you
free”

Calandrone can finally establish her own identity as Lucia’s daughter, who looks like her, has her fiery personality and green eyes, her tenacity and her passion. There is a powerful sense of homecoming. She goes to see her mother’s sweetheart, Tonino, the boy (now 80) who was chased away with a shotgun by Lucia’s father. He keeps a little shrine to his lost love. He is taken aback to meet Calandrone’s daughter, who is the same age as Lucia was when they fell in love. “He is stupendous,” Calandrone tells me.

“The first time he saw my daughter, he behaved just like a grandpa, he put €50 in her pocket and said, ‘Buy yourself whatever you like.’ Yesterday he saw me on TV and rang me up. He said, ‘You look worn out. Are you sure you’re eating enough?’” She laughs.

Since Your Little Matter came out in Italy, the book has sparked a national conversation “on the subject of divorce, on the freedom of women,” Calandrone tells me. “My book is read in many schools, and I find it very moving that the story of a woman who was not able to study can talk to students through me.”

Calandrone lives in San Giovanni in Rome with her son Arturo and daughter Anna. She is separated from their father, which is happily no longer a criminal offence. It’s a life her mother could only dream of, but fought – against all odds – to secure for her. In Your Little Matter, Calandrone plunges into her tragic history to recover her mother’s memory, to restore her reputation, and to bring her home. In the last line of the book, as she witnesses Lucia’s reburial, Calandrone writes: “Music be with you, my daughter.”

It’s a startling moment: mother and daughter have become entwined. Who is speaking here, I ask, is she imagining Lucia’s voice? “When I started out on this journey, I didn’t know who I was going to meet,” she says. “And the more I got to know her, the more I became fond of her. She never got to my age. She’s still so young. She’s just a girl. And in the end I adopted her. Now I’ve got another daughter.”

Your Little Matter: My Mother, a News Item by Maria Grazia Calandrone and translated by Antonella Lettieri is published by Foundry Editions on 18 June. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.