Matrescence

Critics Review

• The best book I’ve ever read about motherhood … Myths are smashed from page one … Experimental flourishes – alongside all that beautiful, accessible writing – add to its majesty. Matrescence is essential reading, bloody and alive, roaring and ready to change conversations

  Observer

• I kept scribbling in the margins: ‘We need to know this stuff!’ … An important addition to the literature of motherhood … [It is] wide-ranging in its scope, packed with statistics about mental health, new studies on the rewiring of women’s brains after childbirth and the presence of foetal cells in our bodies … Jones seems to come as close as it’s possible to describing this indescribable moment in a woman’s life

  Spectator

• A wild and beautiful book … a book that will be passed among friends and will no doubt bring solace … Reading this, I felt a jolt of recognition … more than six years later I can still feel the searing, silencing shame. I wish someone could have handed me Matrescence

  New Statesman

• An exploration of the contrast between myth and reality and between individual and social expectations … Jones writes beautifully and with searing honesty about the life-changing physical and emotional impact of having a child

  The Times

• A vital, hopeful book … to read Matrescence is to emerge chastened and ready for change

  i News

• Beautiful and creative … Jones is a pioneer … she skilfully elucidates the monumental shifts motherhood brings … I found myself inwardly cheering

  Guardian

• It is difficult to put into words the importance of this book. I felt it in my heart. I carried it with me, I think I always will. Jones has written the book we desperately needed.

  Daisy Johnson

• Matrescence took me on a journey of reminescence through my own pregnancies and early years of motherhood, eliciting wry recognition, surprise at new evidence and insight, and gratitude for a work that really sees what it is to mother

  Clare Chambers

• A beautiful contemplation of the extraordinary yet ordinary metamorphosis that adult humans undergo as they become mothers … I was entranced … Matrescence is a passionate and powerful maternal roar for change

  Gaia Vince

• Hypnotic, fascinating and long overdue. I am so glad it exists. A gift of a book and told beautifully.

  Laura Dockrill

• Matrescence is the book I’ve been waiting for. It feels like a gift. Radical, questioning and profound, it urges us to recognise and honour the many transformations of motherhood. With the deepest compassion for her fellow mothers, Lucy Jones shows us how contemporary society stacks the odds against them and calls us to imagine new ways of parenting which care for and support those at its heart

  Liz Berry

• You’ll marvel, wince and want to take to the streets after reading Lucy Jones sweeping and courageous multidisciplinary survey of the motherlands. I wish we’d read it before we had our kid. (Mother) nature read in truth and awe

  Tom Mustill

• I was challenged, comforted, educated and nourished by this book … It is the single most powerful, life-changing, heartachingly healing thing I have been given … The kind of book we must ensure every one of us reads

  Kerri ní Dochartaigh

• A beautiful, intelligent book that is as tender and moving as it is demanding and urgent. There is something insightful and original in the way Lucy Jones seamlessly combines the analytical with the emotional, and it is an absolutely essential new addition to the literature of mothering and parenthood

  Clover Stroud

• This book should be a must-read for pretty much everyone. We don’t talk about the hidden realities of the biological, social and psychological effects of matrescence nearly enough. Thank you, Lucy Jones, for changing that

  Dr Jodi Pawluski

• Fascinating

  Henry Mance (via Twitter)

• Dazzling… Matrescence cements Jones’ place as one of the most talented nonfiction writers we have. It really is *astonishingly* good

  Oli Franklin-Wallis (via Twitter)

• Matrescence, is going to set mothers’ worlds alight. Finally, someone has properly expressed what the process of becoming a mother does to women: their sense of self and their brains. We all owe her a debt because it wasn’t just in our heads… Groundbreaking stuff

  Red

• Jones writes like a novelist, capturing wild swings of emotion, doubt, the adoration of a new baby, and (always) the tension between what she thinks is expected of her and the pressure of her own mixed-up feelings

  Daily Mail

• Matrescence is a wild and beautiful book, a blend of memoir, science, psychoanalytical thinking and nature writing with a poetic sensibility and a strong sense of political purpose

  New Statesman *Best Books of the Summer*

• Engaging and sensitive … Matrescence is an important work

  JUNO Magazine