Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood by Adrienne Gruber

Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes is a revelatory hybrid collection that subverts the stereotypes and transcends the platitudes of family life to examine motherhood with blistering insight.

Documenting the birth and early life of her three daughters, Adrienne Gruber shares what it really means to use one’s body to bring another life into the world and the lasting ramifications of that act on both parent and child. Each piece peers into the seemingly mundane to show us the mortal and emotional consequences of maternal bonds, placing experiences of “being a mom” within broader contexts—historical, literary, biological, and psychological—to speak to the ugly realities of parenthood often omitted from mainstream conversations.

Ultimately, these deeply moving, graceful essays force us to consider how close we are to death, even in the most average of moments, and how beauty is a necessary celebration amidst the chaos of being alive.

Praise for Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes

“In this stunning and deeply personal collection of essays, Adrienne Gruber explores modern motherhood in all its beautiful, terrifying, confusing, grotesque, joyful, sometimes mundane, sometimes ridiculous glory, in a way that is both intimate and yet wholly universal. With a poet’s ear for language—unsentimental, startling, sharp as a razor—and a memoirist’s knack for finding meaning in the chaotic churn of everyday life, Gruber cracks open her own heart to show you the truth in your own. Honest, tender, and firmly rooted in the body and its connection to the natural world, Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes is a deep, anguished howl in the dark, a love letter to a complex family, and a careful catalogue of the things we pass on, and the things we must carry on our own.” —Amy Jones, author of Pebble & Dove

“The essays in this book, like Gruber’s articulation of the chimera, reveal a matrilineal narrative of split flesh, eyeballs, sour milk, creepy puppets, blood, illnesses, and grief that leave the nerves exposed. Gruber writes with the precision of a scalpel, revealing with great dexterity, care, and fierceness a beast that lives across lives and stories.” —Elizabeth Ross, author of After Birth

Press Coverage

Most Anticipated: Our 2024 Nonfiction Spring Preview —49th Shelf

26 Works of Canadian Nonfiction Coming Out in Spring 2024 —CBC Books

Podcast interview with Adrienne Gruber —Episode 9, Bookspo, with host Kerry Clare

On the sometimes steep difficulties of parenthood. An excerpt from Adrienne Gruber’s Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes —The Tyee

Writer’s Block: An Interview with Adrienne Gruber —All Lit Up

“Gruber’s candid and often-visceral accounts of birth and motherhood—in essays variously fractal, splintered and novel—are necessary antidotes to any soft-focus rhapsodizing of a madonna and child. These fragments pierce, in all the best ways.” —Lorri Neilsen Glenn, 49th Shelf

Mother as Marionette: Read an Excerpt from Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes —49th Shelf

“Gruber explores and articulates the dark elements of pregnancy and mothering, from depression and exhaustion to whole swaths of anxiety across wonderfully astute, unflinching and absolutely devastating lyric and hybrid prose.” —rob mclennan’s blog

“In questioning her own body, mind, and mothering, breaking it apart, picking at it like a scab until it bleeds out onto the page, Gruber so vividly and profoundly describes the permanent imprint of motherhood on her person.” —Rina Barone, Stories from the Pink House

16 Books for Women’s History Month 2024 —All Lit Up

“Adrienne Gruber’s memoir-in-essays cracks open the institution of motherhood with a deeply personal exploration of her own experience. Each of the collection’s three parts reflects interwoven themes: the perceived monstrosity of negative feelings about motherhood, the societal expectation of selflessness in meeting the overwhelming needs of small children, and the resulting loss of agency over
their own lives that many mothers feel.” —Janet Pollock Millar, Room Magazine

“And this is the neighbourhood that Gruber is exploring in her essays, writing about the various ways that bringing life into the world is tangled with death, dead pigeons on the sidewalk. She writes about her pandemic pregnancy, about the challenges of unruly toddlers and being able to hold a child’s gigantic and ferocious feelings, about being stuck in a two bedroom apartment with small kids due to wildfires that have made the air outside unhealthy to breathe. She’s writing about legacy, about her own struggles with mental illness, and those of her scientist mother, and her grandmother’s cognitive decline.” —Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

2024 Books of the Year —Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

The best Canadian nonfiction of 2024 —CBC Books