Giving birth to a child and raising them are two different olympian sports. You don't know what to expect most of the time. Sometimes all it takes is an educated guess and hope with lots and lots of prayer that we don't fuck up this kid in the process. But through all that measures, hopelessness creeps in, inch by inch, and one day you will have a glaring realization that you don't want to be a parent. But it creates a roller coaster of panic emotions and you do the one thing you didn't want to. You somehow fuck up your kid. The unknown narrator in Die, My Love is stuck in this dilemma. But the irony is, she's not trying to be a good mother. She just doesn't want to be a bad one.


Two things stood strikingly out in this novel. Violence and animalistic instincts. Violence, the need to inflict violence, the imagination of it, is something that made my stomach churn. When you look at the root of it, you can see the dilemma between feminity and the idea of feminity. She uses violence as a way to express her emotions. She is alone, isolated in the French countryside with no support system. The things are always done or decided for her, always criticized for her inability to learn french or speaking it in the wrong way. the toxic femininity and the expectation put on women to be a good little wife tending to the baby and looking after her husband creates a dilemma between her already traumatized mind and reality.


This sort of brings out her animalistic nature. violent, animalistic nature to inflict violence and also brings out intense emotions. Whenever these intense emotions come out in play, she loses control of her instincts, thus more animalistic thoughts. The lines between the humans and animalistic nature of humans are blurred and she's in a state of metaplasticity where both her instincts refuse to cooperate and she (and the narration) becomes fluid with her environment. This also increases her sexual anxiety and the carnal need for pleasure, also fantasizing about them. 


We can see a lot of paradoxes going on in this book. For example, she wants to get better for her baby, but she couldn't love the baby. She wants to be left alone but she is clingy. These undertones almost create a horror scenario where even her raunchy affair with another man feels like a sort of possession. And his obsession with her is alarming and at one point we don't know who is possessed any more. The relationship with her boyfriend, then her husband, doesn't help either. The rigid way in which he practices patriarchy and expects his wife to take care of the baby when he knew she is not well is nothing but a show of privilege. The entitlement people have over a woman's body, time, health is ridiculous and they even dare to behave offended when she resists makes me furious.


It is impossible to note the similarities between Septimus Smith of Mrs Dalloway and Harwicz's unnamed narrator. Both are outsiders. Both don't have the agency to express their feelings. They both either overemote or shut down at the tiniest things. Both are ignored and misunderstood by the medical professionals who are supposed to treat them. Though I feel that it is not intentional, these are too similar to not look at. Harwicz said in an interview that she wrote this book to escape the motherhood that serves as a form of prison and one can see that desperation leaking through the pages.


In her own words, this is the story of a woman faced with two possible fates: being a mother/wife/lover or walking the riskier, marshy path of simply Being. And this will not be such a spectacle has it not for the two translators Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff.