Winter/Spring 2024 Nonfiction Preview: Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood by Adrienne Gruber

The next title in our Winter/Spring 2024 Preview is 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, this deeply moving, graceful collection forces 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.

“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

We’ve selected an excerpt from the book to share with you today. Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes will be released on May 1, 2024, and is available for pre-order from our online shop or from your local independent bookstore.

After I became a mom, stuff began to fall on me. 

It took a few years for me to notice, a few more years before it became a regular occurrence, and even more time before it felt like a hazard. Eventually I thought that perhaps I should be wearing a helmet or a hard hat around my apartment, or that I should outfit myself with a chest and back plate to allow for optimal protection.

I compiled a list of things that fell on me:

Tools. A measuring tape. A giant brick of Parmesan cheese that Dennis bought from Costco. A bottle of Shout. A jug of laundry detergent. Packages of instant noodles. The handle of the vacuum. My kids’ puffy jackets, and other clothes shoved in the bedroom closet. Shoes. The circular blades of the food processor. Paper towel rolls. Bottles of bubbly water. Individual containers of applesauce. Picture frames. That tiny fucking Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom castle. Cans of tuna.

Puttering around my apartment became a contact sport. I needed to anticipate falling objects, slow down time in order to have the chance to react, to pull my body out of the way. I had to be on high alert at all times.

It was also my job to heal quickly and efficiently and quietly if I happened to get struck by something. To not make my daughters wait a single second longer for their goldfish crackers, their cut-up apples, or their TV.

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Adrienne Gruber is an award-winning writer originally from Saskatoon. She is the author of five chapbooks, three books of poetry, including Q & A, Buoyancy Control, and This is the Nightmare, and the creative nonfiction collection, Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood. She won the 2015 Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron poetry contest, SubTerrain’s 2017 Lush Triumphant poetry contest, placed third in Event’s 2020 creative non-fiction contest, and was the runner up in SubTerrain’s 2023 creative non-fiction contest. Both her poetry and non-fiction has been longlisted for the CBC Books awards. In 2012, Mimic was awarded the bp Nichol Chapbook Award. Adrienne lives with her partner and their three daughters on Nex̱wlélex̱m (Bowen Island), B.C., the traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples.