The Reading Room: Olive by Emma Gannon
As we approach our midlife, many of us find ourselves at a crossroads. Often, a motherhood type of crossroads. Maybe you’ve always known you wanted children, maybe you want them but it doesn’t work out that way, or perhaps you’ve always known parenting isn’t a road you would ever venture down – you’re childfree by choice (CBC) – and still trying to figure it all out.
The latter is the case for the protagonist in Emma Gannon’s Olive: a sharp, relevant, keenly observed debut. The book centres on the titular Olive, whose first-person narrative examines this decision not to have a baby, or rather, to be CBC.
Olive by Emma Gannon, HarperCollins, out now
The Book:
Olive by Emma Gannon
Publication:
July 2020
Why it should be Read:
Your thirties are a tumultuous decade. So much changes; there are so many choices to be made around work, relationships, or the decision to have children. The pressure is always there to tick boxes and to do it in a particular order. Olive had her job in order. She’s good at her job as an editor of a magazine (apart from the occasional crying in the toilets), she has great friends, but she has broken up with her Jacob after almost 10 years because they couldn’t agree on children.
It’s 2019, and Olive has always lived life to her own tune, and strikingly, she knows what she wants, or rather, what she does not want: she does not want to be a parent. She never saw it as a part of her life plan. Her friends, however, did.
Bea is single-parenting her three children while her husband travels for work, Cec is pregnant and exhausted and Isla is depressed about her failed IVF attempts (not to mention dealing with debilitating endometriosis pain). It’s when her friends begin to drift, caught up with marriage and motherhood, that Olive begins to question her life choices. She feels discontented and confused by her ambivalence towards kids (her ovaries have never ‘twitched’ at the sight of a cute baby, but she’s afraid to say this aloud), the societal pressures of what she should be doing are all around her.
What makes this refreshing is Olive’s active pursuit of a childfree life – as opposed to the latter. Even when re-examining her life choices, in her heart, she knows motherhood is not something she wants – and there is not a woman out there who has not felt this push-and-pull when it comes to making a major life decision like this.
Jennifer McShane, July 2020.
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