Friday Special Blend
Friday March 29th, 2024 with Susan Johnston
Just a Poet. Colin Linden. Musk Ox. Katherine Leyton on Motherlike.

We'll start with music - new tunes, and musicians performing around Ottawa this week. In the second hour, Katherine Leyton joins me live to talk about her brand-new work, Motherlike. About Motherlike: "As soon as Katherine Leyton discovered she was pregnant, a powerful reckoning began. Motherlike is both a feminist memoir of new motherhood as well as a rumination on womanhood. A book for anyone interested in an honest and revealing look at a process that is essential to our experience as humans, and yet is routinely unexamined and dismissed. Sharp and intensely candid, entertaining, and deeply poignant, Leyton weaves her own experience of becoming a mother to her son (the shocks, the strangeness, and the pleasures) with historical research and cultural commentary. Everything from the history of the birth control pill and the objectification of women's bodies to the risks of labor and the realities of being postpartum. Leyton invites us into a very personal story that reflects a larger picture of ourselves."