I ponder the loving, soft, yielding wonder of motherhood. I ponder the lonely, cruel, relentless obligation of motherhood. Tiny’s voice is almost a stream-of-consciousness, and she continues to ask herself pertinent questions: ‘Is this what it means to be a mother, then? To be in constant, irrational conflict with one’s own child? To be constantly challenged by the stubborn will of a creature who doesn’t respond to logic or reason, and who always wins?’ Later, she tells her baby: ‘This is motherhood. There are some bloody scenes here, delivered in raw, visceral, and animalistic prose. There is an otherworldly, shapeshifting quality to the prose. Oshetsky’s writing is thoughtful, and incredibly compelling. In the sense of a protagonist changing so much following a huge life-event, as becoming a mother is, Oshetsky has created a strangely believable story, despite all of its oddities. Meanwhile, the growing owl-baby, ‘in her fierce self-possession, her untameable will’, begins to teach Tiny that to be different, and not to meet the expectations of others, is okay. Tiny and her husband, perhaps inevitably, begin to fight over what they feel is right for Chouette. Her husband avoids Chouette more and more, whilst Tiny is drawn closer toward her. Despite this, Tiny sees her little daughter as nothing short of perfect. Chouette will not walk or talk, and ‘lashes out when frightened’, as well as causing chaos when out in public. When baby Chouette – the French feminine form of the word owl – is born, her father is ‘devastated by her condition and strange appearance’. Everyone can tell that I’m about to enter a world where women sit alone in the silent corners of cafeterias, spoon-feeding their grown children, while others look away.’ During her pregnancy, she says: ‘I begin to understand the nature of my sacrifice… I’m pregnant with an owl-baby.
The owl-baby infiltrates every part of Tiny’s body and mind. In the narrative, Tiny then shifts to addressing everything to her baby, telling her: ‘Your owlness is with you from the very beginning… and on the day that you are born – on the day when I first look down on your pinched-red, tiny-clawed, outraged little body lying naked and intubated in a box – I won’t have the slightest idea about who you are, or what I will become.’ After a vivid dream, in which she is ‘making tender love with an owl’, she wakes the next morning with ‘talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace.’ She tells her husband that the baby is not his, and that she will give birth to an “owl-baby”, an outsider just like her. The novel opens in Sacramento, California, where our protagonist, professional cellist Tiny, finds out about her pregnancy.
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