'I'm lovingly angry': Marianne Levy explains why mothers are meant to suffer in silence

I meet Marianne Levy in a laid-back café near her home in North London, doors wide enough to accommodate the bulkiest pushchairs, high chairs stacked in a corner, our rhythmic conversation by the strange squeal or cry jag (not ours). It's the kind of place, Levy says, that mothers on maternity leave tend to encounter, "where normal people don't want to sit, because there's a baby crying." This place is a regular haunt for her and her children: an eight-year-old daughter and an almost four-year-old son. "It's big and wide and the staff don't actively dislike children, they are kind to them." - a child-friendly space to talk about Levy's memoir, Don't Forget To Scream, as the book is a heartfelt attempt to break the discourse of motherhood out of of that silo, and bring it to a wider and more diverse audience. It's an unvarnished look at the grimy, lonely, scary and alienating side of pregnancy and motherhood, covering birth phobia and physical trauma, erosion of sense of self and self-esteem. of Levy in the early months and years, and the structural, social, economic impasse in which so many mothers find themselves. Twenty years after the birth of my eldest child, it stirred emotions I had buried, evoking mind-numbing, lonely afternoons of quiet desperation pushing prams.

That sounds a bit sinister: it's not. Levy is an endearing and often funny author. She did some comedy as an actress in her twenties (although she mostly worked as a voice artist) and she's a dry, witty presence on social media, where I met her for the first time. The book is sharp on infantilizing names for baby gear (Bumbo, Dookie, Shnuggle), and the appalling voluntary impulses of little children ("You mustn't shake Tennent's abandoned can in your mouth.") There are virtuoso swearing, pets the psychodrama of fish, and a revoltingly precise taxonomy of the different kinds of filth that motherhood entails. She's also gifted with the dreamy oxytocin infatuation mothers can feel around babies, their physique, what she calls "whole minutes of honeyed bliss."

Levy met her husband in her early thirties, when she was writing children's books (she now works as a journalist). They got married, started trying for a baby when Levy was 34, and she became pregnant almost instantly. "I had always assumed that I would have a family," she says, "and I think I thought I was crystallizing how I felt about it by trying to have one." Instead, she was catapulted into an ambivalent, anxious pregnancy and a traumatic five-day labor with lasting physical and emotional consequences. With no family around to help her, she found maternity leave lonely and strange.

She also felt a sense of failure, both at birth, then at the beginning of maternity. A Cambridge graduate, hard worker and high achiever, Levy says: “I really struggled with the feeling that pregnancy and birth were tied to the kind of person you are. I'm not totally indifferent: you're going through a really tough experience and you say, I'm so proud of myself, I did this with no pain relief, or I had the birth I wanted... But if you get to be proud of your handiwork, there has to be a downside, right? Levy says up until then that she had always been good at things or, "If I wasn't good at something, I would put my shoulder to it and get better at it. You can't do that with the pregnancy and parenthood."

Levy had a hard time, but not exceptionally; she is perfectly aware of it. Of her first birth, she said, "I read This Is Going To Hurt [Adam Kay's memoir of his experiences as an obstetrician and junior gynecologist] and I wouldn't have signed up in her day. Completely standard, nothing interesting happened. That's sort of the point: Remember to scream seeks to challenge the way we minimize and deny how difficult the ordinary work of mothering is.