Black Milk Book by Elif Shafak ( Paperback )

Postpartum depression affects millions of new mothers every year, and—like most of its victims—Elif Shafak never expected to be one of them. But after the birth of her first child in 2006, the internationally bestselling Turkish author remembers how, “for the first time my adult life… words wouldn’t speak to me” (p. 5). As her despair finally eased, Shafak sought to resuscitate her writing life by chronicling her own experiences.

As a Sufi, Shafak believes that “to be human… means to live with an orchestra of conflicting voices and mixed emotions” (p. xii). Within herself, she had always acknowledged that there was not one identity, but a cacophony of voices that squabbled for ascendance. They were her “harem within” (p. 46), and Shafak recognized each of her internal voices: Little Miss Practical, Dame Dervish, Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, and Miss High-Browed Cynic.

In their disparate ways, each guided her toward intellectual and spiritual pursuits and away from conventional domestic life. Early in her career, she even wrote “The Manifesto of the Single Girl,” in which she asserted that “literature is my husband and books are my children” (p. 15). She believed that she would never commit bigamy by taking another spouse.

When she first met Eyup, her husband-to-be, Miss High-Browed Cynic attempted to deter him—to no avail. Soon, Shafak’s romantic feelings for Eyup awakened two dormant members of her harem, sexy Blue Belle Bovary and nurturing Mama Rice Pudding. When she and Eyup married, these two new voices grew increasingly loud, but it was still with conflicted feelings that Shafak acknowledged her pregnancy.

When her daughter was born, Shafak aspired to be both a devoted wife and mother, and a committed and productive writer. Seven weeks later, Shafak struggled to manage the mundane tasks of caring for an infant. “My self-confidence has become a scoop of ice cream melting fast under the duress of motherhood” (p. 210).

Shafak humorously calls him, “Lord Poton,” but the djinn who visited her was far from lighthearted. Walling her inside the prison of postpartum depression, Lord Poton also silenced Shafak’s voices. For the next eight months, “literature turned into a distant and forbidden land” (p. 250), and Shafak was essentially stripped of her identity.

As Lord Poton’s power waned, Shafak sought wisdom in the writings and lives of her predecessors. Spanning the literary diaspora—from an imagined female poet muted by sixteenth-century Middle Eastern mores to the groundbreaking examples of George Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Carson McCullers, and Alice Walker among many others—Shafak’s search eventually led her back to her own inner harem.

Combining a raw, honest and surprisingly funny memoir with Shafak’s thoughtful reflections on integrating authorship and motherhood in a patriarchal society, Black Milk is a brave and bold achievement by an author, a woman and a mother whose experiences in the crucible of postpartum depression taught her to give rein to all her voices, and—in so doing—forge her own unique identity.