Motherhood

Motherhood, as the central theme of the novel, is explored through a comparison between the experience of becoming a mother and the experience of a large-scale natural disaster, with the main assertion of the novel being that both of these events cause a cataclysmic change in life after which nothing else can ever be the same. The progress of the news reports about the impending natural disaster correspond with the impending birth of the narrator’s child: “I am thirty-two weeks pregnant when they announce it: the water is rising faster than they thought” (3); “I am thirty-eight weeks pregnant when they tell us we will have to move. That we are within the Gulp Zone” (3); “When I am thirty-nine weeks they tell us we don’t have to move, actually: it was all a mistake” (5). The impending natural disaster, like the impending birth, is thus depicted...