1st Edition
Another Mother Curating and Creating Voices of Adoption, Surrogacy and Egg Donation
Another Mother gives voice to women who become mothers through the routes of adoption, surrogacy and egg donation, and their silent partners – the birth mothers, surrogate mothers and egg donors – who make motherhood possible for them.
Exploring experiences of motherhood beyond the biological mother raising her child, Everington draws on interviews and a range of interdisciplinary approaches to produce illuminating personal testimonies which expand our understanding of what it means to be a mother. The life writing narratives also examine the unique and hidden relationships that exist between adopters and birth mothers, egg donors and women who become mothers through egg donation, and surrogates and women who become mothers through surrogacy.
Offering a fresh approach to life writing, using hybrid form encompassing edited interview, re-imagined scenes, poetry, personal essay and quotation collage, this topical book is recommended for anyone interested in motherhood studies, gender and women’s studies, life writing studies, the sociology of reproduction, creative non-fiction writing approaches, oral history and ethnography studies.
Part I: Introduction
1. Birthing the book
2. Politics and power
Part II: Experimental life writing3. Alison’s story
4. Charlotte’s story
5. Shanta’s story part II
6. Rubi’s story
7. Robin’s story
8. Lorraine’s story
9. Shanta’s story part III
10. Margaret’s story
11. Contextual note
Part III: Conclusion
12. Contributing to new understandings of motherhood through expansion and analysis of life writing forms
Biography
Shanta Everington is Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University, UK, where she gained her PhD in Creative Writing. A creative and critical writer working across a range of forms, much of Shanta’s writing explores recurring themes of difference, identity and belonging. Previous books include the novel Marilyn and Me (2007), narrated by a young woman with a learning disability who models herself on Marilyn Monroe, and young adult novel XY (2014), set in a dystopian world where humans are born intersex with gender assigned at birth. She is also a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow (2021–23) and a member of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE).
"Through its use of interviews combined with a range of creative and editorial methods, the book brings to life stories relating to 'motherhood' that go beyond the biological mother ... Each chapter charts a different individual's experiences and includes donation, recipients, adopters, donors or mothers whose children were adopted, mothers through surrogacy or surrogates. The intimacy and the depth of exploration make it deeply moving, enriched all the more by the author's own experiences, impressions and poetic creations woven in the fabric of her interviewees' stories."
Appeared in Donor Conception Network Journal winter edition.
