Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens review, the last day of maternity leave is a comic rollercoaster
Article excerpt
Lisa Owens's debut novel *Natural Disaster* compresses the final day of maternity leave into a darkly comic portrait of motherhood in all its messy specificity. An unnamed mother of two boys navigates the last hours of freedom before returning to work, her internal monologue ricocheting between tenderness, resentment, exhaustion, and unexpected joy. Owens captures parenting in granular, unflinching detail, the small humiliations, the logistics that never quite resolve, the way a child's chaos can feel both unbearable and oddly beautiful. The novel treats its protagonist with genuine respect, neither sentimentalizing motherhood nor reducing it to complaint. It's a precisely observed character study that builds surprising emotional weight from what might seem like an ordinary day.
Parenting is represented in all its hilarious, moving and truthfully plodding detail, in the story of a mother and her two little boys
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.
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