(The Guardian, approx 10 mins reading time)
When Dockrill wrote a blog post six months after she started to get better (which preceded her book), it went viral. “Even if people haven’t had the illness that I had, it was quite shocking to see how many people could relate. I was like: why is nobody speaking about the psychological side-effects of this?” Her book is darkly funny in places but mostly unflinching about the animal meatiness of new motherhood, and spares its author no corner to cower in. “I felt this urge to kind of rip the mask off the killer, and as soon as you do that, it loses its power,” she says. “I guess I wanted to make the podcast that I wished existed when I was recovering. You can’t read a book when you’ve got a newborn.”