Perhaps more than any other relationship or identity, motherhood is both organic and constructed. Mothers are created by the existence of their children, and then simultaneously expanded and abbreviated by maternity as a social category, and by the impossible intimacy of this most primal human relationship. In Scar Tissue: Tracing Motherhood, Montreal writer and literary philosopher Sara Danièle Michaud brings her considerable intellectual scope to the question. Intense and intertextual?the book sips as easily from Saint Augustine as from Sheila Heti?this long essay is both deeply personal and eloquently universal.
