Mother Maker

"I don’t even know what it is about this book, but I really connected with the female main character, Dylan. I’m not quite as hippie as she is, but the whole idea that the universe has a plan—I have to believe that at this point. I was diagnosed with a disability at 15 and depression when I was 10. There’s got to be a reason for all this and I came to the conclusion that it’s so I can share these stories with the world. Dylan very much thinks, ‘It will all work out. Even if things don’t seem to be going the way you want them right now, they’re going to get there because this is how it’s supposed to go.’ I think because I have a lot of anxiety, I like the idea of just leaving it up to the universe. I can do as much as I can to write good books and be a nice person, but at the end of the day, I can’t force these things to happen. I’ve got to believe that they will and that they can. In Dylan, I see more of what I want to be like: ‘It’ll be fine, you need to calm down’, basically. Baseball is one of the sports I probably know the least about, but a lot of sports people have to travel for long periods. With baseball, you’re traveling for 9-10 months every year. Dylan gets pregnant after a one-night stand with a baseball player. It’s about trying to find the balance between him going to be the father of her child and how you’re supposed to manage when someone just isn’t there a lot of the time. The scene that I love the most in this book is when he starts talking to the baby in her belly. The baby’s too small to be able to hear him, but he says he’s going to start doing it now, so that by the time the baby can hear through the belly, he’ll already be good at it. He wants to be present and be there for the baby, but it’s hard with all the traveling. It was just really nice seeing these two people, who didn’t know each other, complement each other in such a way that they feel confident and comfortable enough to share a child and start sharing their life together. She trusts him so that even if he is traveling for 10 months of the year, she knows he’ll be a good partner and a good parent. He trusts her enough to know that she’ll support him if he decides to retire because he doesn’t want to be away. The specific sport isn’t necessarily important. It was the idea of being away from someone for that long and finding that balance in a relationship that really stuck with me. It’s interesting because most people go to work at nine o’clock and come home at five, so it’s very easy to schedule your life around that. In my book, he misses one of the first scans because he has to go and play. He’s missing out on all of those key moments in my book—and it’s the same in Mother Maker. If you’re married to someone, or you’re dating someone, there’s a bit more room to say, ‘I can’t be here for this.’ There’s a lot more compromise. But when you’re just co-parenting, it can be very easy for the woman to feel, ‘I’m here all day, every day, living this pregnancy, and you get to just galavant around.’ In my book, Ellis worries that he’s going to go off and find someone else, while she’s trapped in the house with her pregnancy, with her business. She can’t go and live this big life that he could so easily go and live."