QUEEN MAB

A young woman’s travels to and through the lands of motherhood and mental illness are chronicled with brutal clarity in McBride’s debut novel.

The tiny faerie Queen Mab of literary fame—referred to by Shakespeare and Shelley among others—is reputed to bring dreams to humans as they sleep. That bit of folklore takes a malignant turn as nightmares and madness haunt McBride’s young protagonist, Madeleine Brodeur—affectionately referred to as Queen Mab by her husband. She’s 23 and pursuing a doctorate in literature at an English university, specializing in the Victorian and Modern eras. After a grueling labor, Madeleine and her daughter, Maud, remain hospitalized for days for treatment of complications. Once home, Madeleine becomes increasingly isolated from her colleagues, disturbed by her husband’s return to work, and tormented by thoughts that the Maud she is caring for now is a changeling, not the child she gave birth to. She is driven to take a deep dive into the literature and scholarship about faeries, but this only further complicates her disoriented thoughts: Is she the changeling, not Maud? McBride explores the pressures of motherhood and the total surrender of oneself to a screaming, hungry, often angry, being. In Madeleine’s case, the sweet fairy tale of motherhood is replaced by nightmarish beliefs and suspicions. Her already contentious relationship with her adoptive parents is strained. Her conventionally happy husband is bewildered and, eventually, worried. (He thinks the remedy here might be to attend mother-and-infant groups.) A stark portrait of maternal depression and psychosis is unflinchingly presented; McBride pulls no punches in her portrait of a woman desperately trying to use the research tools and familiar stories she knows to make sense of the unrelenting psychological horror of a hallucinatory bout with postpartum mental illness.

A harrowing tale of mothering and myth.